2025 wrap-up

Another year done. And after a Pretty Bad Year, 2025 turned out to be a Pretty Good Year.

We won’t relitigate 2024 except to say: it was a lot. Dustborn stirred up feelings — some of it predictable, most of it not. We weren’t prepared for the storm; it hit us hard.

We spent a good chunk of last autumn finding our footing again. August and September (and parts of October) were rough, but we ended 2024 on a high note and carried that momentum with us into 2025.

As we stand on the precipice of a new year, and the studio is preparing to close for a full two weeks — a well-deserved break for everyone here — it’s a good time to reflect on the year that’s gone, and look forward to the year to come.

And the year 2025 began on a banger.

In March, we pulled the curtain back on a project that had quietly been keeping us sane since October. Known internally as Project Nomad, Hello Sunshine was announced — and very successfully so — with a teaser trailer and Steam store page, alongside a (non-public) playable demo, which we brought with us to GDC in San Francisco.

We pitched the game widely to publishers, and the response was unambiguously strong, with more interest than on any previous project. More serious conversations, more people “getting it”, more follow-up meetings. That process led to us signing with Megabit Publishing in June; a partnership we announced publicly just a few weeks ago. And this gave us something precious: stability, momentum, faith in the future at a moment when the industry is not exactly generous with any of those things.

Hello Sunshine has continued to perform. In those first weeks after we announced the game, the teaser trailer hit 300,000 views, and we banked more than 30,000 Steam wishlists. Shortly after the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted event in December, we crossed 100,000 wishlists — and we’re now past 120K, with 20,000 people signed up for the playtests starting early 2026.

In addition to working on Hello Sunshine, we continued to support Dustborn.

Three major free updates went out in 2025 (following on from two in 2024) and we stayed in close contact with the game’s small but passionate community. We know we’re behind on some promises — not because we stopped caring, but because time and people are finite resources. Every update we did ship was substantial: new scenes, combat improvements, a better band mini-game, lots of fixes and optimisations. We also shipped a native Mac version.

In 2026, we plan to return to Dustborn one final time with a major, “director’s cut”-style update that reshapes big parts of the experience. After that, the future of Dustborn is unclear, as both of our development teams are fully committed for the foreseeable future. Still, we’d very much like to return to that world someday — when we have the time and space to do it properly.

Speaking of a second team: Hello Sunshine isn’t the only new game in development. We’ve been quietly working on another project, currently known as Project M. It’s been bouncing around in our heads for a long time, and this project is bigger than a single game — it’s a whole universe — but we’re planning to take it one careful step at a time. We’ll be ready to talk about it properly (and announce an actual game!) in 2026.

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As for our older games — Dreamfall Chapters and Draugen — 2025 was quiet. Not for lack of love, but because there are only so many hours in a day. With 15 people working on two ambitious projects (plus ongoing Dustborn updates) something had to give. Our previous games matter deeply to us, they’re very much part of Red Thread’s identity. And people are still buying them, which is amazing!

(Steam has a big sale going on as we write this, in case you’ve been on the fence for, uh, the past decade.)

When we sit down in January for our 2026 strategy session, all three catalogue titles will be part of the conversation. Realistically, next year is more likely to mean fixes and small additions than grand revivals — but none of these games are forgotten.

2025 was a tough year in a brutal industry. We said goodbye to long-time colleagues who decided to leave games behind. We watched friends and peers shut down studios, cancel projects, burn out. We kept a very close eye on our budgets — Dustborn didn’t exactly set the world on fire, financially — and made more cautious decisions than we would have liked.

Still, we were luckier than many. We’re still here, we’re still making games, and we’re still doing it with people we like, trust, respect. That counts for a lot.

One bright spot this year was our community. For a long time — especially during Dustborn’s development — we went dark, and our community faded away. Starting in late 2024, and accelerating in early 2025 with a dedicated community and social media manager, that changed for the better. Our Discord quadrupled in size. Our other channels saw increased traffic. More importantly, we started talking and listening. We’re not returning to silent mode, ever. Community matters, and in 2026 we’re doubling down — quite literally, with a new person joining our community team in February, along with a continued focus on live streams, community events, competitions, and lots and lots of content.

Red Thread Games is 13 years old now. A teenager! Like with any child, there have been plenty of growing pains. We’ve been as big as 25 people. We’ve been as small as eight. Today we’re 15: lean, battle-scarred, still standing — and still occupying the same office space we moved into in June 2013. We’ll be growing again in 2026, with two new team members joining early in the year, and more to follow.

Looking ahead, 2026 could be a transformative year for us. The industry remains unstable, and we’re not pretending otherwise. Nothing is guaranteed. We plan cautiously. Our contingency plans have contingencies. But there are real reasons to feel hopeful — and quietly excited — about where things are going.

To everyone who supported us, challenged us, argued with us, believed in us, or just paid attention: thank you. To those who were disappointed, angry, or unconvinced: we hear you, even when we disagree. We’ll keep doing the only thing we know how to do: make the kinds of games we believe in, with care, curiosity…and a stubborn refusal to go away.

We’ll be back after the holidays. See you all in 2026.