This article was originally published on August 21, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

How does licensed IP move around the industry? What happens to the studios responsible for creating the games? And what does it mean for players waiting for games involved in financial swaps that could cause years-long delays?

British strategy publisher Slitherine Software announced in July that it had acquired the licence, publishing rights and back catalogue for Games Workshop's Blood Bowl from Nacon, whose parent, Bigben Interactive, defaulted on a bond repayment earlier this year and was pushed into insolvency proceedings. Several Nacon subsidiaries, including long-time Blood Bowl developer Cyanide, were swept into the same process. Marco Minoli, Slitherine's director of publishing, speaks to Knowledge about extracting the franchise from Nacon, and what comes next.

Three deals, not one

The Blood Bowl deal was not a single acquisition. "We've had to broker three different deals," Minoli tells us. "One is the acquisition of the assets belonging to Nacon. One is the acquisition of the licence, because Nacon had a licence for Blood Bowl from Games Workshop. But also, we wanted to secure ongoing development, so we had to broker a deal to get support from the existing developer."

Slitherine's existing relationship with Games Workshop – which already includes four properties – smoothed the licensing talks.

"I keep referring to them as the best partners to work with in general," Minoli says. "They will tell you what is possible and not possible very clearly. There's no blurred lines or anything."

The acquisition process was competitive and fast. "There was competition. I can't tell you who else, but there was competition," Minoli says, putting the whole deal at six weeks from start to finish, against years of informal collaboration before Slitherine's 2024 acquisition of Battlefront, developer of the Combat Mission series.

Warhammer Blood Bowl: a moving target

Warhammer Blood Bowl – the next mainline game that runs on the same engine as 2022's Blood Bowl 3, with a reworked UI and two new factions – was originally slated for a spring launch under Nacon. It slipped amid the insolvency proceedings, and Minoli won't commit to a firm date even now.

"This is a conversation we're having every week," he says. "There's a lot of expectation, and it's all about what is going to be possible in this timeframe."

The bellwether will be a new demo built around Rumble Mode, a seven-a-side variant designed to onboard new players: "If the feedback for that demo is good, then we know we're going to be readier to release at the end of the year."

Blood Bowl 2 owners will carry their content over for free, and the paused World Championship restarts in December, timed to the new release.

"We need the new Warhammer out before we start the new championship," Minoli explains.

Also behind ambiguity over the new release sits the problem of unwinding Blood Bowl 3's existing monetisation strategy.

"If anything, the business model of Blood Bowl 3 is insanely complicated. My take is that if we cannot explain a business model in fewer than ten words, then we won't do it."

The model's transformation isn't frictionless: factions loyal players expected to unlock through playtime are now sold outright.

"People are expecting that if they played a certain amount of hours, they get a faction for free. Now that's a purchasable item on Steam, and they're not happy about it. But we don't want to make factions a premium gift for players who play a lot. We want to make it available to everyone."

Opportunistic, not a strategy

Blood Bowl joins a Warhammer line-up at Slitherine that already includes Gladius and Battlesector. Minoli doesn't expect much crossover in audience, saying "it's very rare that people buy all of your games. We probably get ten per cent of people that will buy three or four of our games."

But Blood Bowl does correspond perfectly with Slitherine's editorial line, that of licensed digital versions of real tabletop games, alongside Bolt Action and the newly announced Memoir '44.

"Blood Bowl fits very well into this category, with a huge following that could work very well as a digital product," Minoli says. He is unapologetic about the size of the audience: "Strategy games are about 15 per cent of the PC gaming market, but the core games are almost like hobbies. It's not a genre, it's a hobby. Niche is great. Hobby means passion, and it's much more rewarding than selling a million copies of something, from a certain point of view."

As to whether Blood Bowl marks a deliberate pivot toward vulturing distressed assets, Minoli resists the idea.

"It's very opportunistic," he says. "We don't have a strategy of going after distressed studios. We're looking at the market as a whole, and the market is in a very weird transition right now." He cites consoles cycling in and out of favour, plus premium mobile titles returning after years of free-to-play dominance.

What he describes as genuinely difficult is not spotting the opportunities, but hiring the people equipped to chase them.

"We put a lot of effort now in trying to select the right people that have this almost like entrepreneurial attitude," he says. "It's very hard."

This article was originally published on August 21, 2026 - read the full issue