Former Hitman Creator Builds New Studio From Ashes of a Failed Attempt
Janos Flösser, a co-founder of IO Interactive (the Hitman series) has revealed details on his new studio, Wombo Games, and its first game, Raiders of Blacksveil. It’s a co-op roguelite and it’s coming to Early Access on PC soon.
IO Interactive started in 1998, in Copenhagen, as a joint venture between film studio Nordisk Film and game studio Reto-Moto, where Flösser was joined by Jesper Vorsholt Jørgensen, Rasmus Guldberg-Kjær, Martin Munk Pollas, Karsten Lemann Hvidberg, Jacob Andersen, and David Guldbrandsen. Flösser left IO in 2016 to start CREY Games, which included a short-lived social gaming platform, then created Wombo Games in 2023.
“I’m here today to announce our new indie studio,” Flösser said in an official Wombo Games YouTube video. “We are Wombo Games, still in Copenhagen, but this time together with some very good friends in our sister studio in Budapest.”
“Some of us have been around this industry for ages,” he added, “but we teamed up with very young, very talented developers from this part of the world, to create our vision of an addictively fun game.”
Raiders of Blackveil
Wombo’s debut title is being promoted as an action roguelite for up to three players, with MOBA-like characters and upgrades. Set in an industrial fantasy world, the game pits animals against the dystopian human organization Blackveil.
There are plans to let players choose from 8 roles (Mage, Assassin, Priest, Guardian, Monk, Druid, Warrior, and Warlock) although only 4 are currently available. Although it has yet to launch in Early Access, Raiders of Blackveil is currently running playtests, with the next one set for April 25, 2025.
The playtest version, which is available through the official Wombo Discord server, also includes 1 biome with 15 levels, 9 enemy types, 2 mini-bosses and 2 biome-bosses.
“We plan to expand the roster with additional rebel champions to boost replayability and deepen champion composition and build strategy options,” Wombo said on the game’s official site. “We also aim to introduce more biomes in future updates, bringing fresh environments, enemies, and gameplay challenges to explore.”
Third Time’s The Charm
Aside from his work with IO Interactive, Janos Flösser served as a Senior Partner for an investment firm, Promentum Equity Partners, and founded a previous game studio, CREY Games, in 2016. However, Flösser didn’t serve as the studio CEO until 2021; before then the position was held by his colleague Fabien Rossini (Square Enix, Eidos-Montreal).
CREY positioned itself as a social platform where gamers could build and share games without needing any prior coding or development experience. Games would also implement a revenue share model, and explicitly target Gen Z.
“CREY is a new gaming platform designed specifically for Gen Z and with social at its core,” said Rossini in an interview with Startups Magazine in December 2020. “We are a group of gaming industry veterans as well as a few tech nerds, who have united to change gaming by developing the world’s first true social gaming network.”
“The idea came from Janos Flösser,” Rossini added. “In 2008, I was working with Janos Flösser at Square Enix. At the time we realized the future of gaming would lie in user generated content. If it was a little too early then, the market has matured and is now ripe for disruption by user generated platforms such as Roblox and now CREY, which was founded at the end of 2016 to do exactly that – disrupt the future of gaming and social networking.”
In an interview with Danish news site Watch Medier, in 2021, Flösser said: “The strategy is to deliver more original PC games than those we see on the market today. Games today are largely copies of something else, but we want to deliver games that are both of higher quality and more original in their idea and structure than much of what you find on the market today. That’s why I’m joining the company as CEO.”
However, while the CREY website still exists, none of its links work, and its presence on social media is limited to one lonely Instagram post and a long-abandoned official Reddit channel. Despite Promentum Equity Partners also being the main investors in the studio, CREY shut down in mid-2023.
“CREY Games had shut down due to lack of further funding because it failed to achieve product market fit in time,” said Balázs Vecsey, a former CREY employee now working for Wombo Games, on his official website.
“CREY had a lot of potential in it to become a gateway to professional game development. It could have been a great way for kids to discover game creation and have some sense of success early on, one that will drive them, before they spend years learning more professional tools like Unreal, Unity, or just programming in general.”
Part of its demise may well have been due to competitors, as Roblox was already going strong by 2021 and by 2023 had 70.2 million daily active users. Meanwhile, Buildbox was making a name for itself as a user-friendly social gaming platform that added revenue share features in 2021. HypeHype also entered the scene in 2021, and has since grown into a fully-featured social gaming platform.
Rossini can’t be faulted for his optimism at the time, however: “We have an ambitious growth plan for the coming year. As the saying goes, content is king, and as such we’re working closely with our existing content creators to take their games to the next level as well as working hard to drive new content creation.”
“We’re also building a new initiative – CREY academy – where we plan to teach creators not only how to better use our platform but also adopt deeper approaches to game design.”
Wombo Games was born from the ashes of CREY, with some of the same staff carried over. With any luck, it won’t fall prey to competitors or lack of funding.
