Horror game developer Bloober Team stands at a key inflection point. Riding high off the critical and commercial success of the remake of Konami’s Silent Hill 2, the studio is in the process of finishing work on Cronos: The New Dawn, an ambitious time traveling survival horror game of far greater scale than any of their previous original games. It’s grown to over 250 developers and has joined the ranks of larger triple-A studios now investing 4-5 years in each development cycle.
Experienced developers know this is a uniquely challenging moment for companies making single-player games. One major driver of the massive game industry layoffs of the last year has been a series of stumbles at studios that grew too fast after making a hit game. Positive cash flow and healthy coffers unfortunately aren’t enough to promise stability.
And yet stability is what CEO Piotr Babieno says he’s searching for. In an interview with Game Developer at the 2025 Game Developers Conference, the head of the studio known for making games featuring characters grappling with mental illness explained some of his thinking for leading a healthy workplace.
“The most important thing,” he said, “is to create a safe environment. Every single decision I make is not just about if the business is good, but if we’ll be able to take care of the 250 people in the studio, and their families as well.”
It’s a surprising value to hear from a CEO in the year 2025, when many are choosing to talk about going all-in on AI or publicly criticizing their own employees about their games not having an “edge.” So what precisely, does Babieno define as a “safe environment?
Keeping your studio “safe” is a tremendous challenge
The word “safe” takes on a whole new meaning for a Polish game studio in the 2020s. Not only are the typical struggles of game development a day-to-day challenge, but, like many, Bloober had to learn about the realities of making games remotely in the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally the country is nervously watching developments over the border in neighboring Ukraine, where Russia’s invasion sparks concerns over a broader response that could draw in NATO. With game development cycles for games like Silent Hill 2 and the upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn running about 5 years, the decisions Babieno makes have huge ripple effects.
Russia’s invasion seems to be top of mind for Babieno, who explained that Bloober employs developers who hail from Russia and Ukraine—both of whom had to relocate given the circumstances of the war. The studio was also one of the first to publicly halt sales of its games in Russia—not out of spite for the Russian people, Babieno said, but because the company did not want to contribute tax revenue to the government’s coffers which could drive spending on its invasion.
“Games should connect us rather than make [barriers] between countries or between fans,” he said. “I feel we are doing everything we can to support our fans all over the world, but we will never support people who are destroying our world and making horrors bigger than we are able deliver [in our games].”
Image via Bloober Team.
But that’s a very high level issue. Day-to-day, Babieno said he’s grappling with the same things many developers at his company (and around the world) struggle with: self-imposed crunch. “I’m not a good example,” he admitted, describing the feeling of wanting to work longer hours because of “passion” for a project. “We are trying to support our team as much as we can and sometimes will increase the time of development if needed to create a good game.”
Bloober apparently also connects employees with psychologists in and around the company to access mental health support (and considering their games are about psychological horror, perhaps some consulting on the topic), but Babieno said regular messaging about “having your own life” is the “first” step in creating that environment.
On the topic of depicting mental health in games—we’ve heard from developers over the years that sometimes researching real-world injuries, be they physical or mental, can sometimes have a psychological shock of its own. Babieno said he hasn’t seen that happen at Bloober, in part because the studio is deliberate about what topics it tackles. “When we are creating a new title, there’s always the question of ‘what would we like to add to the conversation,'” he said, adding that these topics are meant to encourage “judgment-free” debate on the team.
It’s the “planning” stage that Babieno seemed to circle back to in our conversation. If you want to better understand the company releasing Cronos: The New Dawn in 2025, you need to go all the way back… to 2019.
Cronos shows the strategic scaling of Bloober’s headcount
Track the arc of Bloober’s lineup from 2015 all the way through Cronos and you’ll see a fairly steady increase in game scope going from Layers of Fear, through Observer, past The Medium, and all the way through Silent Hill 2. This was deliberate, said Babieno, and followed a strategic decision in 2015 to commit to horror games. When the company had fewer employees, it focused in on narrative experiences buoyed by environmental storytelling, and scaled up to include more action and player navigation, now seen in the combat-heavy Cronos.
“Because of this, it was a natural step to increase the team and increase the scope of our games,” he said, noting that the studio has picked up “more fans” because of this. He echoed a common refrain you hear from indie and triple-A studios, that the company is in business to make high-quality games, not just turn a profit. It does seem the company communicates to its workers that they have to make solid decisions as early as possible, because when they do, they’re locking into a long commitment they can’t easily get out of.
“When we are talking about what will be next, it has to be something we would like to work on for the next five years…to spend a big part of our life to create something unusual.”
Those kinds of impactful decisions can include something as fundamental as setting. Cronos is the second game from Bloober set in the studio’s native Poland, a decision that doesn’t seem so unusual in 2025 but Babienbo said in the beginning, it was a really risky call when trying to make a game that appeals to a global audience. “That was the conversation in the Polish game industry,” he recalled. “That we shouldn’t make games in Poland because it might not sell as well as if you made a game set in the United States.”
Developers in other regions might feel buoyed by Babieno’s words, as he said the “act locally and think globally” approach has paid off. Developers at the studio have an opportunity to be “faithful” to their homeland but also embrace the “trust” of players that they’ll be curious enough to embrace that faith and explore new kinds of horrors in a land they may never have visited.
He tossed out the idea that Bloober could make a game set in San Francisco (itself beset by the horrors of the tech industry), but it would never be as good as one made by people living in the United States.
None of what Babieno described in our conversation should be seen as easy or simple. It’s common knowledge that in today’s market, just making a good game isn’t enough to sustain a business, and you can put “we don’t crunch” in your company values all you want, but you might look up one day and realize your whole team has worked until 9PM out of love for the game. Taking on the mantle of leadership is about setting yourself up to make hard decisions. “If you would like to have advice, don’t run a game studio because maybe it could kill you” Babieno joked.
But Babieno—and Bloober—are still here, still alive and standing in the tough environment of 2025. Perhaps for however difficult the road has been, seeing his job as being about “protecting” his workers may be the kind of principle that could help other studios endure these difficult times.
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