“We will spend another tens of millions of dollars and fail heavily.”

This had been in development since 2018 and had cost the studio nearly 10m.

Oh and the more recentSouth of Midnight.

An illustrative-style character in a cancelled video game called Project 8, sitting cross-legged on the ground with their head bowed. They are masculine and their chest is bared and they have pale, greyish skin and long dark hair.

So what went wrong?

And that meant growth.

“We scaled up everywhere,” Marszał says.

A character with pale grey skin clambers across a ledge in a fantasy landscape. It’s a screenshot from 11 bit’s cancelled game Project 8.

It was crazy growth.

We had a lot of money from This War of Mine.

We had a lot of money from Frostpunk - it sold crazy again.

A pale, grey skinned masculine character sits cross-legged on the floor of a fantasy area with a orange, glowing bird on a branch nearby. It’s a screenshot from 11 bit Studio’s cancelled game Project 8.

We had a lot of money and what to do now?"

The answer was to take a risk.

“And it was a bit too optimistic to be honest.

And making games isn’t easy.

It’s very difficult stuff.”

After all, how do you make people feel denial?

How do you make people experience bargaining?

And what does acceptance look like?

“It was difficult stuff,” he says.

And again, it was a subject that sounded anything but easy to realise.

“Good to hear that,” he says,

There were other issues with Project 8 too.

The stealth gameplay required more thought than typical, straight-up combat.

It revolved around avoidance, but how could 11 bit make that fun?

And there were problems with narration and getting the story across.

The only playable parts were a prologue and a denial level after it.

As a result, production began to slip.

“Another delay after delay,” Marszał says.

A decision had to be made.

What he means is a particular pop in of game: the Hellblades and Plague Tales of the world.

“I’m not saying that there aren’t players for those games,” he adds.

But the market is different," Marszał says.

It could be really risky for us."

“The last two years, it was extremely fucking hard.

We were so optimistic.

We were too optimistic.

We did so many errors.

Both internally developed games such as The Alters, and externally developed games for the studio’s publishing arm.

This forced a top-to-bottom reorganisation at 11 bit studios, and Project 8 was caught in that storm.

“We allowed ourselves - that was the optimism - to do too difficult a game.

It was just too ambitious.

Either [cancel it] or we will spend another tens of millions of dollars and fail heavily.”

Let’s hope these games see development through.