February’s PlayStation State of Play was a Who’s Who of big-name video game franchises. God of War, Silent Hill, Castlevania, and even Legacy of Kain were all featured on the jam-packed livestream, with each series getting a new game. But those games aren’t being developed by the studios you might be expecting. Konami isn’t making Silent Hill: Townfall in-house and God of War Sons of Sparta isn’t solely a Santa Monica Studio production. Instead, much smaller indie teams are at the helm.
It’s not a coincidence; it’s the culmination of a slow-building trend that’s been gaining momentum in the video game industry over the past few years. Major publishers are getting looser with their most prized IP and handing the keys over to indie teams with a proven track record. It’s a strategy that’s revitalizing long-dormant franchises, and one that offers some hope for an industry that’s struggled to keep up with the impossible task of exponential growth.
Look back at the games announced during the State of Play stream, and you’ll see some surprising developers behind them. God of War: Sons of Sparta, a surprise-released 2D Metroidvania, is a collaboration between Santa Monica Studio and Mega Cat Studios, the latter being the developer behind 2023’s WrestleQuest. Silent Hill: Townfall comes to us from Observation developer Screen Burn Interactive (née No Code). Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is by Motion Twin, the studio that created Dead Cells, and Evil Empire, the team that has handled much of that game’s post-launch DLC. And Legacy of Kain: Ascendance comes from Bit Bot Media and FreakZone Games, who created a 2D game based off The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 2024.
It’s a surprising list of developers considering the valuable franchises they’re working with. Major publishers like Sony tend to guard their biggest IP with their lives, entrusting development to reliable in-house studios. There have always been exceptions to that rule here and there, but companies have only seemed to tighten their grip on their games within the last two decades. Take God of War as an example. After the success of the first game, we got a mobile game by Javaground and two PSP games by Ready at Dawn. But since 2013, the series has been handled almost exclusively by Santa Monica Studio. Sons of Sparta being handled by Mega Cat, a small studio that is not owned by Sony, is a significant shift.
These aren’t isolated cases that just so happened to be on the same stream; we’ve seen the strategy employed more and more in the past few years. Nintendo toyed with it in 2019 for Cadence of Hyrule, a rhythm Zelda spinoff from the studio behind Crypt of the Necrodancer, but not much came from that experiment. 2025 saw a major moment for indie studios taking on big IP, though. Sega worked with Lizardcube (Streets of Rage 4) for Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, Ubisoft and Evil Empire (again, Dead Cells) brought The Rogue Prince of Persia to its 1.0 release, and The Game Kitchen (Blasphemous) gave us Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound mere months ahead of the AAA Ninja Gaiden 4, published by Xbox Game Studios.
It’s a brewing sea change for an industry in desperate need of one. It’s no secret that AAA video game production has become more untenable over time. Games cost more money to make and take longer to develop thanks to rising scopes. Bigger and better games means riskier projects and longer waits between games. That’s bad news if you’re, say, Bethesda and aren’t able to capitalize on the success of Amazon’s Fallout show until years after the height of its popularity. Remakes and remasters can help fill the gaps between big productions, but a more agile approach becomes a necessity.
That’s where calling on independent external teams to make smaller games for a fraction of the time and money begins to look viable. It’s a bit of a symbiotic relationship between the AAA and indie ecosystems, too. Big publishers get to keep their IP fresh with new, critical darling games, and indie studios that are struggling to get new projects funded in a challenging industry climate land a big gig. It’s a win-win, even if publishers always run the risk of producing a dud.
Will that trend continue and redefine how games are made? Maybe for a bit, but it’s hard to say how long. There’s a clear parallel to be drawn to cinema history and the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s. In that period, Hollywood studios turned to fresh independent directors to revitalize interest in cinema amid waning returns for their big-budget brand of epics and musicals. It’s that renaissance period that gave us directors like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.
One could argue that gaming is now firmly in its own version of the New Hollywood movement, though there’s one key difference: directors like Spielberg weren’t tapped to freshen up old IP. They were creating new, original work that was pushing the boundaries of cinema forward. This moment in gaming, on the other hand, is more about rehabilitating brands. In that way, it perhaps more closely parallels the efforts of Marvel Studios, and its history of signing promising indie directors to helm Iron Man films. (Crucially, the New Hollywood movement began to fade once Star Wars landed as a major hit and studios started salivating for IP-driven blockbusters, a trend that has remained true for decades now.)
This moment will no doubt produce a lot of excellent franchise games, but its long-term impact will be measured by what these studios are able to do afterwards. Silent Hill: Townfall needs to lead to Screen Burn Interactive securing funding for its next original horror game. We need to see more success stories like Absolum, where several of the developers behind Streets of Rage 4 took their success from an established IP and followed it up with an original hit that moved the beat-em-up genre forward. Our brightest indie studios can’t be forced to survive on franchises they don’t own. There needs to be a future in looking back to the past, otherwise all this nostalgia will be for nothing.