Bloober Team

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Bloober Team's name appeared on the title screen of Silent Hill 2 in 2024, one of the most beloved and scrutinized survival horror games ever made. For many players, that was the first time they had heard of a Polish studio from Kraków. But the story of how a company that started with 20 employees in November 2008 ended up remaking one of horror gaming's most untouchable classics involves a failed game that was reworked from scratch, a prize given by one of Poland's most respected cultural institutions, a majority stake sold to a Chinese technology giant, and a string of dark, first-person games that slowly built an audience hungry for exactly what Bloober Team was making. Who were the two founders? What was the game that nearly broke them before it made them? And how does a studio from Kraków persuade Konami to hand over the keys to Silent Hill?

• 2. Origins and Early Struggles

  ›

  Piotr Babieno and Piotr Bielatowicz founded the studio formally on the 6th of November 2008, with Babieno taking the role of chief executive officer. The company grew out of Nibris, a developer established in 2006, and its 20 founding employees worked out of offices in Kraków. Nibris had been developing a game called Sadness for the Wii, but in October 2010 the parent company exited the game business and cancelled Sadness entirely. Many of its developers crossed over to Bloober Team, giving the young studio its first significant surge in headcount.

  The earliest releases were modest in ambition. Music Master: Chopin came out for Microsoft Windows and iOS to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frédéric Chopin, featuring piano and vocal performances of the composer's work. In 2013 the studio shipped Deathmatch Village, a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita, built around three-on-three arena combat with cross-play between the two consoles. These were not the games that would define the studio's reputation, but they kept it alive long enough to reach the moment that changed everything.

• 3. The Basement Crawl Turning Point

  ›

  Basement Crawl launched alongside the PlayStation 4 and was received poorly by players and critics. Rather than move on to a new project, the studio made the decision to rework the game. The team kept the core concept but rebuilt everything around it: new graphics, new game mechanics, a new story, and new game modes.

  The result was Brawl, released in February 2015. It earned favourable reviews and was made available free of charge to anyone who had already purchased Basement Crawl. That act of replacing a failure with a free upgrade was an early signal of the studio's willingness to absorb a setback and rework its way out. The discipline that salvage required would shape the studio's approach to larger and more consequential projects in the years that followed.

• 4. Building a Horror Identity

  ›

  Layers of Fear arrived in 2016 and established the studio as a maker of psychological horror games. Observer followed in 2017, and Blair Witch in 2019, published by Lionsgate Games. The Medium came out in 2021, published by Bloober Team itself. Each title added to a catalogue that was beginning to look less like a general-purpose developer's output and more like a coherent body of work in a single genre.

  On the 10th of January 2018, the studio received the Paszport Polityki award in the "Digital Culture" category. The Paszport Polityki is a prize given annually by Polityka, one of Poland's leading news weeklies, to figures and organisations making a significant cultural contribution. Being recognised in that company placed Bloober Team in a conversation that stretched well beyond the games industry. Eight days before that award ceremony, on the 8th of March 2018, a new project codenamed Project Méliès had been announced; by October that year it had been identified as Layers of Fear 2, to be released in 2019 through Gun Media.

• 5. Investment, Partnerships, and the Stock Market

  ›

  Bloober Team spent about a year in negotiations with various companies about a potential acquisition. In March 2021 it announced that it would stay independent, though it was open to strategic partnerships. Three months later, in June 2021, it announced exactly that: a strategic partnership with Konami to jointly share technology and develop games.

  The corporate picture grew more complex in October 2021 when Tencent became the studio's majority shareholder with a 22% stake. In May 2022, Bloober Team announced what it described as a significant license and distribution agreement with Sony Interactive Entertainment. Since January 2024, the company has been listed on the main market of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, a marker of the institutional weight it had accumulated since those early Kraków offices. The studio also owns a third-party publisher called Feardemic, and holds 34.98% of the shares in Draw Distance, the company that had formerly been its subsidiary iFun4all before a name change in August 2019.

• 6. Remaking Silent Hill 2

  ›

  In October 2022, after months of speculation, Konami confirmed that Bloober Team was remaking Silent Hill 2. The studio built the remake on Unreal Engine 5, and it launched in 2024 as a timed console exclusive for PlayStation 5 while also releasing for Windows through Steam. In an interview with DreadXP, the studio disclosed that it had been invited by Konami to pitch its vision for the remake in competition with other studios, meaning the assignment was earned rather than simply awarded.

  The same year that Silent Hill 2 shipped, the studio and Konami announced they were already working on another game together. In June 2025, that project was revealed to be a remake of the original Silent Hill. Meanwhile, at Summer Game Fest 2022, the studio had confirmed a new Layers of Fear described as both a remaster and sequel of the original series, also built on Unreal Engine 5, which was released in 2023.

• 7. Broken Mirror Games and New Projects

  ›

  In 2024, Bloober Team established a publishing subsidiary called Broken Mirror Games. Its first announced title, teased in April 2024 under the codename Project R, was eventually revealed in March 2025 as I Hate This Place, developed by Rock Square Thunder. The game was originally scheduled for release on the 7th of November 2025 before being pushed to the 29th of January 2026.

  A second new project, codenamed Project C, was announced in April 2024 in partnership with Take-Two Interactive's publishing label Private Division. A month later, Private Division cancelled the deal. Bloober Team stated it was prepared for alternatives, and by October 2024 the game had been re-announced as Cronos: The New Dawn, self-published and released in September 2025. Broken Mirror Games is also set to publish a codenamed Project M in 2026 for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, with Bloober Team itself handling development after drawing it back in-house from Draw Distance in July 2024. Also on the subsidiary's slate is Star Trek: Infection, a VR survival horror game developed by Played with Fire and scheduled for Meta Quest 3 and Windows.