Ways to ensure your game IP thrives in 2026 and beyond  

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out in an industry where low budget games can compete directly with AAA releases. Those with known IP may have it marginally easier—after all, they have an established audience, less marketing headaches, and a sense of stability amid uncertain times. But a known IP is no longer a guarantee of success. In fact, some flagship IPs from the industry’s most reliable players are alarmingly at risk of stagnating. 

2026 is the year to arrest the slide. Here’s how developers can go about doing exactly that. 

Renewing fan enthusiasm 

Gamers have always been passionate about what makes their favorite franchises unique. When they express concern at changes, sequels or modernizations, it usually stems from a desire that the distinctive elements that first grabbed them continue to evolve, without losing the core essence of the series itself.

There are several ways a developer can approach this. The direction you go in for your project will depend on where its audience is at, and the resources you have available. Here are some of the best examples from recent memory.

Evolve gameplay the right way 

We’ll start by focusing on Supercell, creators of several multibillion-dollar game series. When their hugely successful 2018 battle royale hit Brawl Stars started to stagnate and lose players, they didn’t rest on their laurels.

Instead, they made big changes, adding fresh player engagement and gameplay elements that drastically altered the experience.

Where many companies might have been tentative and played it safe, Supercell’s gamble paid off—resulting in a record year for what was by that point a six-year-old game.

Make drastic, ground-up game changes 

On the other hand, Supercell is also not averse to ruthlessly cutting its losses. Following its guiding principle: ‘Serve players in a live game they love, so it’s played and remembered forever,’ in May 2025 the Finnish company threw out much of what had made their popular party action game Squad Busters so successful—making radical bottom-up changes to the core gameplay loop and player progression flow and effectively relaunching the game as ‘Squad Busters 2.0.’ 

Revamp the commercial levers built into your game’s business model 

Supercell’s changes sometimes also go beyond gameplay. For that, you need look no further than complete rework of Brawl Stars monetization. In 2020 the company launched a battle pass, Brawl Stars, a full two years after the game’s original release—with financial results that kept the game going for a good four years before the gameplay rework was even needed. 

Crucially, changes like the ones above are about finding the sweet spot between revenue generation and player satisfaction. The player should always come first, and Supercell is a great example of a developer consistently doing this while significantly increasing revenue. 

Create a triple-A experience on a double-A budget 

Other recent releases have shown how focusing on gameplay fundamentals can yield impressive results, even with moderate budgets: 

Black Myth: Wukong, an action RPG based on a centuries-old tale, is a beautiful Chinese-made single-player game made with a fraction of the budget of many Western AAA games. Likewise, Kingdom Come Deliverance II has earned acclaim as one of the finest RPGs in recent years, with its rich dialogue and attention to detail, on a relatively modest $40 million budget. 

Meanwhile, Korean-made games like The First Berserker: Khazan, Stellar Blade, and Lies of P are all focused, excellent single-player experiences. 

And it’s a similar story in the west, where the front-runner for 2025’s Game Awards Game of the Year is Clair Obscure: Expedition 33—a French game developed by a team of around 30 people (for context, around 2,000 people contributed to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2), for a modest budget significantly south of $40m. 

The message here is clear: Devs don’t need to break the bank to see success. Established IP or not, doubling down on imagination, creativity, and compelling gameplay loops can absolutely help you find an audience and ultimately lead your project to lucrative long-term success.

Reignite interest with remakes 

There are plenty of examples of IPs that have been revitalized by remakes. With Resident Evil 4 (2023), for instance, Capcom stayed laser-focused on creating the best possible gaming experience while sticking to the vision of the original version.

In the end, their rework to an 18 year-old game resisted the temptation to force in en vogue live service elements or a multiplayer suite—instead delivering a dedicated singleplayer release to near universal critical and commercial success (and followed it up with an equally well received DLC to boot!).

The best remakes find the right balance between what old fans loved and what the market currently demands—they going all-in on what makes their IP special, while making bold decisions on what to change for a more modern experience. For a detailed breakdown, read our report on seven of the best game remakes of recent years. 

Need dev help? External teams can make all the difference 

Of course, it’s all very well saying you should do the things above. The real trick is in how you do it—building an IP-authentic experience fans will love, while meeting deadlines, hitting targets and ultimately delivering within your planned launch window. 

That’s where finding the right external dev partner can prove invaluable. 

Whether you need support for a bulletproof game concept, or require strategic input from the very start of development, external partners can take the load off your core team, allowing them to focus on what matters most: the central themes, features, and mechanics that define a game.

Better still, the most accomplished external partners offer cost-effective expertise that can plug into your existing team setup and hit the ground running—letting you offload development of assets, environments, extra modes and more, while ensuring your high quality standards and team culture are equally upheld.

We work with the industry’s best—to everyone’s benefit 

As a global external dev partner, Room 8 Group has worked on projects of every scope imaginable. These are just two of our recent successes. 

The detail in the devil: asset creation for Diablo IV 

When our art team, Room 8 Studio, worked with Blizzard on Diablo IV—an already well-established IP—they built on top of their creative vision by working within the existing visual direction. That meant Blizzard’s team could focus on other things, while we helped determine the look of specific assets—inclu

Blizzard defined the direction; we helped them deliver it; everyone was thrilled with the end result.

Empowering Paradox with top tech for Crusader Kings III 

On the flipside, more and more devs are planning content roadmaps with external partners, making them a bigger part of the equation from the first instance. This is especially true in the context of buttressing a game’s tech. We’ve been working on Crusader Kings III for more than a year, leaning on our technological expertise to optimize the game—and, crucially for IP maximization, its DLC and other content updates—for consoles in particular.

By taking care of all things game engineering and technology, we give Paradox the space to focus on the core game—ensuring valuable tech time isn’t wasted on getting projects over the line at the expense of creative iteration.

Outsourcing is a growing trend 

Clearly, there is an industry-wide shift towards first-party teams keeping their core lean to work on their IP’s central elements, while working with external partners who take care of carefully defined tasks. Remember earlier, when we mentioned Clair Obscure being made by a team of 30? Well, that was something of a red herring. Its developer, Sandfall Interactive, actually worked with many more than 30 people via external partners—while leaning on modern technology to further streamlin

“Unreal Engine has empowered us to deliver on a vision that would have been impossible to execute a few years back with a team our size,” Tom Guillermin, Sandfall Interactive’s Co-Founder and Lead Programmer, told Unreal Engine—proving that while smallish core teams now have the tools to accomplish incredible things by themselves, they’re still wise to lean on  external devs to cover their blind spots. 

In the cross-platform age, make sure your game’s tech is covered 

Games have never been more expensive to make or buy—so it’s more vital than ever that developers reach as wide an audience as possible with their work. DLC releases and ports have become two of the most popular ways to do that, keeping a fresh IP alive and at the forefront of public consciousness.Yet each is a time sink that can take developers away from creating updates to their original release, or even working on new IP that will drive the company and industry forward.

Porting and DLC creation, then, are two crucial areas to get right. Yet because tools like Unity and Unreal Engine are now so easy to use, fewer and fewer teams have the level of game engineering mastery to pull off a port of the required quality. The result is teams eventually running into optimization issues across platforms, and a number of recent releases where performance of the port falls short compared to the original version. 

Solving the tech challenge 

With game studios concerned about their reputations and the potential long-tail impact to their bottom line that these issues bring, many are choosing to form strategic partnerships with external game-tech specialists. 

At Room 8 Group, we excel at game engineering—providing exceptional tech solutions like optimization, porting, and liveops to studios whose in-house teams are either stretched tin across multiple projects, or focused on finessing their IP’s core gameplay and coherence.

Whatever your studio’s focus, our view is that devs simply cannot afford to compromise on game tech. Whether you work with an external partner, or make your technical considerations in-house from the very start of development, getting this part right can be the difference between retaining players and losing them for the foreseeable future. 

Ultimately, the core of any thriving IP is your ability to generate unpredictable gameplay built on solid technical foundations. Yet with budgets ballooning, team sizes shrinking, and deeply sophisticated technical ability being eaten away at by hand-holding and AI-powered industry tools, delivering those things is more challenging than ever. The answer lies in equipping developers with the tools and conditions they need to deliver what matters most to players—and finding the right external partners can be crucial in helping it all come together.

Looking for the right external dev partner? You’ve found them 

Whether you need great gameplay ideas, inspired art or reliable technical know-how, Room 8 Group can help. Whatever your project, let’s talk.