Lauren spends most of her time dead in League of Legends, or equally as dead in Valorant. Don’t ask her about Vampire: The Masquerade.
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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.”
A core part of Battlestate Games Publishing’s mission statement is its focus on these unique, hardcore FPS games. The developer says it wants titles that “other publishers have called too ambitious, too niche, or too risky – the ideas that don’t fit a conventional pitch deck.” Things like Bodycam or perhaps the newest viral shooter on the block, Wardogs, would fit comfortably into that bucket.
But again there’s this idea of risk: perhaps there’s a reason some games don’t get picked up by mainstream publishers. I asked Buyanov to talk to me about that mantra. “It’s pretty simple,” he says. “We don’t treat this part of our company as a publishing business. I just want to have a shelter for those games, and have the future of these games with us because we can share our experience and our community.
“We don’t target this financial approach to publishing – I just want to see and test those games; the risky games. They can change everything. They can have something special that can change the whole industry – that’s why it’s risky. It might sound risky, look risky, and it’s just something different. It’s what we need right now.”
“With all the games releasing right now, it’s more or less all the same – the same genres, the same games,” he continues. “Good visuals are the standard for them; with DLSS 5 you can make a [game] look photorealistic without putting in a lot of effort – and I know much [effort] you need to make the picture look photorealistic, especially with different kinds of engines.
“Some risky ideas with risky implementation – some prototypes even – are going to have something in there, like the scent of greatness; something special in there that can be unfolded into something new. So this is our approach: really risky, interesting ideas above potential profits and all that.”
It’s an impressive mission statement, backed up by not just Battlestate’s aforementioned confidence, but Buyanov’s (and no doubt the wider team’s) passion. I’m transfixed on the idea of being a “helping hand” – it feels like everything in this modern world has to have some form of monetary payback; for every action, there’s a price. Buyanov’s comments are genuinely refreshing.
Battlestate Games is opening its doors to publishing.
We built Tarkov on ideas everyone else said were too much, too slow, too punishing, too weird. Turns out “too much” was the point.
Now we want to do that for other people’s games.
If you’ve got a hardcore project that every… pic.twitter.com/stSUZb9GPQ
– Battlestate Games (@bstategames) September 3, 2026
Post-reveal, Battlestate Games Publishing has actively been receiving pitches. I ask Buyanov if he’s seen anything he likes, and while he keeps the details pretty close to his chest, he tells me that he’s received “more than 100 pitches already” of games in various stages of development. “There’s a couple of well-known titles actually; indie games” he continues, but smiles and says, “I won’t be saying anything, of course.”
“I guess there’s maybe five to ten games which are already suitable for us, but we need to see how exactly we can do it and what we need.” He highlights that signing games “isn’t a fast thing,” so it’s unclear when we’ll see the first Battlestate-published game appear. Whatever it happens to be, though, I’m excited to see what that looks like.