Escape from Tarkov Developer Battlestate Games Plans to Back Risky Projects Other Publishers Pass On
Nikita Buyanov says the new publishing arm has received more than 100 pitches, with 5 to 10 projects already looking suitable.
Battlestate Games has received more than 100 pitches for its new publishing arm, giving the Escape from Tarkov developer an early test of its plan to back games that conventional publishers might reject. Nikita Buyanov says roughly 5 to 10 of those projects may already fit the company’s focus, although none have been announced.
Battlestate introduced the initiative during an FPS Games Show hosted by BULKHEAD on September 3, 2026. Buyanov described Battlestate Games Publishing less as a standard commercial division and more as a support system for small, indie, niche, and hardcore projects, including teams that need shelter and resources to bring ambitious ideas to market.
Battlestate Games is opening its doors to publishing.
We built Tarkov on ideas everyone else said were too much, too slow, too punishing, too weird. Turns out "too much" was the point.
Now we want to do that for other people's games.
If you've got a hardcore project that every… pic.twitter.com/stSUZb9GPQ
— Battlestate Games (@bstategames) September 3, 2026
“We don’t treat this as a big publishing business or something. We treat it as a helping hand for small projects, indie projects, and niche projects, hardcore games.”
Buyanov’s definition of risk is creative as much as financial. He wants to test games that might sound or look different at first, especially projects with one idea capable of changing a genre or even the wider industry. He also criticized the sameness of many current releases, where familiar genres and repeated formulas leave less room for unusual designs.
Escape from Tarkov gives that strategy a clear reference point. Battlestate built its flagship shooter around a punishing first-person structure that offers little help to new players, yet the game found a large audience despite that difficult design. The history does not make every unusual project a safe bet, but it explains why the studio is willing to look beyond predictable returns.
There is still a cost to that approach. Buyanov said the main risk for Battlestate is adding more work while Escape from Tarkov continues to have plenty left to do. He described the publishing effort as a medium risk rather than a high one, partly because the company is treating it as an experiment and not trying to build a large publishing operation overnight.
Publishing is not entirely new territory for Buyanov. He has also worked with Rant Games on Fragmentary Order, a hardcore sci-fi shooter. The new arm broadens that effort by giving Battlestate a way to support more teams and projects outside its own flagship game.
The first signing may still be some distance away. Buyanov said several pitches came from known indie projects, but he did not name them and stressed that signing a game is not a fast process. For now, Battlestate Games is looking for the kind of project that offers more than polished visuals, with a concept worth helping into the hands of a wider hardcore audience.
Would you trust Battlestate Games to shepherd an unusual hardcore project, or should the studio keep its attention on Tarkov? Share the kind of game you would want it to publish, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.
