In December 2025, German developer Limbic Entertainment was sold by Bandai Namco to a “private investor”. This news came just over three years after the Japanese giant acquired a majority stake in the studio for an undisclosed sum.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom 2026, Limbic communications manager Christopher Grünewald said that there’s no animosity between the two companies, adding that Bandai Namco is “super happy” that the studio has seen success with its recently released Corsair Cove.
Limbic retained all of its IP after the split, meaning that the studio can do “whatever we want” with Corsair Cove, “which is the best thing, because the game is successful now,” Grünewald says.
Moving to being an independent studio wasn’t a big shift for Limbic; founded in 2002, the company was self-owned for almost 20 years, and is fast approaching its 24th birthday.
“We know how it is to be independent,” Grünewald says. “It made sense for us to be a part of Bandai Namco, especially as long as we worked on Park Beyond together. It’s not that it’s super scary for us now, or not like we’ve never done this before. It has its advantages, but it’s also scary because you no longer have infinite funding for everything.”
Government support
Limbic – even before it was sold by Bandai Namco – has seen support from the German state, which has certainly eased any anxieties about not having enough money. “That’s pretty good because that is something that Germany never had before, unlike other countries,” Grünewald explains. “That helps, absolutely. There was also no need to find funding for finishing Corsair Cove – this was already done – but we needed, of course, a publisher to handle the PR stuff on an international scale – everything I cannot do alone.”
Corsair Cove recently hit 200,000 sales, less than a month after its release on July 31. Grünewald says this is “really good” adding that the game still has around 700,000 wishlists on Steam.
“We only announced the game in April, so there was less than four months until release,” he says. “In that time we reached half a million wishlists, which is just awesome. We still have 85% positive reviews on Steam, which is also amazing.” The game is targeted at a global audience, but has become “pretty big” in China. “In the scale of China, it’s not big, of course, but if like 0.001% of the Chinese people love your game, it’s still big,” Grünewald says. “It still makes sense.”
He adds that Corsair Cove has also done well in both Japan and the United States; this is all important for Limbic given the historic audience for these kinds of games.
“It’s good to see because for a long time, the biggest market and the only market that made sense for strategy games, especially for city-building games, was Germany and Europe in general,” Grünewald explains. “It’s cool that we have fans worldwide who love to play the game.”
Everybody loves pirates
As for why Corsair Cove has done well, there are a few reasons. Grünewald says that has heard from its audience that the game “feels really fresh”.
“This is something it’s really hard to do,” he says. “There are so many city builders in the last few years because it’s a successful genre, even if it’s still a niche genre. When we released the demo, everyone was saying it feels so fresh, it feels new, and this is amazing.” The other major factor is that the game launched “absolutely polished at release”.
“Performance was good, there were no bugs, no game breakers,” Grünewald says. “This was absolutely important because that was the biggest issue for Park Beyond. We do not hide that. Everyone knows that we released a game that wasn’t in the best state. And this was our biggest learning: cut the content at some point and just have a game that people can have fun with without any performance issues. This is so important today.”
There’s also the small matter of there not really being any other pirate city builders, something that no doubt has helped Corsair Cove stand out.
“It could have been another genre, but the idea to have a pirate city builder was pretty much from the first concept, years ago,” Grünewald says. “Then we thought about how you would build a city in a pirate city builder… We wanted to have this chaos, but it’s not chaos in a bad way, it’s this beautiful chaos, which is also what the community is saying. They love that.
“Of course, there are still players who want everything to be perfect, and you can pretty much do that as well if you want to. We give you a lot of freedom there. It still naturally looks more chaotic for a city builder, which also helps it stand out in the big space of city builders, because these games are usually pretty structured and all accurate.”
Niche targeting
One lesson that smaller developers have had to learn in the past few years is the value of targeting a niche and excelling in that space. How big that niche is also helps you budget and control the cost of your game. That is a lesson that Limbic has taken on board heartily, in part from its experience with Park Beyond.
“With that game, we tried to get pretty much three audiences: management gamers, city builders, and also cosy gamers and people who want to have a nice park with flowers and everything, all this kind of stuff that is not directly connected to the gameplay. It was just too much,” Grünewald says.
“We are not like a 500-person company. We have around 90 people right now. You have to really think about what you can do and what makes sense, especially when you are a smaller company. We aren’t super small; we are midsize, but if you have a company size like that, you really have to think about what you can do and what makes sense.” He concludes: “It makes sense to have one target group and make the game perfect for them.”
