Thunderful World is a promise to be a new force in game development, publishing and beyond

Change is afoot in the world of videogame publishing. Where once the average player might have been able to name – and count on one hand – the companies that brought to market most of the big titles they purchased, today the picture is much more complicated. Selfpublishing is on the rise, of course, as is the indie dev-pub model. But we’re also becoming aware of ever more sleeping giants: companies that have, quietly, without many of us noticing, become forces to rival the biggest publishers and platform holders.

Look at Devolver Digital, which, quite apart from having one of the year’s best runs of releases, from Death’s Door to Inscryption, has just become a publicly traded company, with an initial valuation of almost $1bn. Or at Embracer Group which, despite being a name that remains unfamiliar to many, announced earlier this year that it had in the region of 120 games in development.

In that context, November’s Thunderful World event feels like a statement of intent. It’s the first Direct-style broadcast from Thunderful Group, a Swedish developer-publisher-distributor-investor conglomerate that – to oversimplify slightly – grew out of tiny Gothenburg studio Image & Form, the studio behind the SteamWorld games.

So we’re rather taken by surprise when Brjánn Sigurgeirsson, former head of Image & Form, now CEO of Thunderful Group, tells us that the company has around 40 games in the works. “We have 13 games in internal development in parallel right now, double that amount in publishing,” he says. “We want to be a leading publisher of games in… let’s start with Europe, and then go global.” Image & Form having long been an Edge favourite, this is far from the first we’ve heard about Thunderful – but even we hadn’t quite realised what was bubbling under the surface.

Brjánn Sigurgeirsson, CEO, and Agostino Simonetta, chief strategy and investment officer

Thunderful World is an attempt to tackle that head-on. The showcase features more announcements of note than some entire days of this year’s rather anaemic E3. But more than that, with Mark Hamill hosting, it establishes an identity for a company that, as chief strategy and investment officer Agostino Simonetta admits, “for a lot of people, doesn’t mean that much.” Playful, with a narrative throughline involving fictionalised versions of Hamill and Sigurgeirsson, plus a slightly wonky comedy script, the model is clear. Thunderful doesn’t want to be an Embracer, quietly accumulating studios and games. It wants to be a Devolver: an entity with a personality to match its roster, a brand whose games players come to actively seek out.