Battlestate Games Publishing will spotlight "risky" hardcore games. I asked Escape from Tarkov icon and studio COO Nikita Buyanov about it.
The videogame publishing landscape is easily the worst in recent memory. Xbox has laid off over 3,200 employees. New titles are being canceled left, right, and center. In a world where money is in short supply but cash is king, entering the publishing sphere feels like it's risky at best, and a deathwish at worst.
But risk is what Battlestate Games embodies. The creator of Escape from Tarkov, both the company and its COO, Nikita Buyanov, have always portrayed themselves as not giving a damn about what others think. There's a rough and readiness; a brutal honesty that I've always admired about Battlestate and its seemingly fearless leadership. In an industry where red tape reigns supreme, Buyanov and Battlestate have always been ready with the scissors. We interviewed them to understand why.
It did shock me to learn that Battlestate is opening its doors to publishing, however. Remaining steadfast in your rugged individualism is one thing, but 2026 feels like it's perhaps the single worst time to enter the market. Battlestate Games Publishing has to contend with rising costs, global instability, and the specter that is Grand Theft Auto 6. It's an intimidating time, but Buyanov isn't exactly known for being easily intimidated.
"I have a desire to help [hardcore FPS games] and niche games like us to make it through," Buyanov says when I ask him about the decision. "A lot of time has passed already [since he thought about this], but now it's submerged. We thought: 'why not? We'll give it a shot.' It's not like we can do it in one single step - like just start publishing projects and all of that. We will need a lot of time, and it will be a new experience for us, too.
"That's another thing that I've always loved in my career: it's to put these boundaries - these limits - then try and break them. We decided to go full speed ahead this year - even right now, we're doing more things and actions within the company than we did for [Tarkov's 1.0] release last year. It's just a matter of our confidence."
I ask him about that confidence: does the Battlestate team think publishing is a risk? And if so, why is it one it's willing to take? "You can say it's a risk, but it's more of a minor risk for us just to be overloaded more than ever, because right now there's still a lot of things left to do for Tarkov, for example.
"But this kind of risk, I think it's more or less medium for us - not high risk. We don't treat this as a big publishing business or something. We treat it as a helping hand for small projects, indie projects, and niche projects - hardcore games. We will allow them to use our audience, and our legacy even, to break through - to have something new, and to [generate] some kind of interest in the hardcore community. We don't treat it as a big, upscaled marketing and all of that. It's more or less an experiment for us, and for the whole industry to make a centralized platform for these kinds of games."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/escape-from-tarkov/publishing-interview-nikita-buyanov
