There's a real sense of momentum about Polish game-maker 11 bit Studios. It might not be turning out blockbusters, in the biggest sense, but the games it makes are thought-provoking in ways which stay with you long after playing. In This War of Mine, we played as civilians trying to survive in a warzone; in Frostpunk we built a city and braced it for apocalyptic cold. Both games asked how far you were prepared to go to survive.
They reviewed well and they sold well. 11 bit announced recently Frostpunk had sold more than 1.4 million copies on PC, and there's a version coming to PS4 and Xbox One this summer (11 bit would like to do Switch, it tells me, but hasn't even begun exploring it yet. Edit: Frostpunk project lead Jakub Stokalski talked more on Twitter about the possibility of a Switch version after this article was published. It doesn't sound likely. "The demand for it would have to be overwhelming for us to consider it," he said.) 11 bit also helps other indie games as publisher. In other words, it's a company on the rise, and all that momentum is going into what's next: Project 8.
Project 8 will be the first game 11 bit has made with consoles in mind from the outset, the company's PR and marketing manager Karol Zajaczkowski tells me, at Digital Dragons 2019. The hope is a simultaneous PC and console launch - whatever those consoles happen to be at the time.