When 10 Chambers launched GTFO into early entry in 2019, the world – and the online game business – was a really totally different place. The studio, then fashioned of solely 9 workers, didn’t know if there was an viewers for an excellent hardcore co-op FPS. So it launched the sport as a quite simple proposition: it was premium, you purchase it as soon as, and also you get all of the content material. No MTX, no DLC, no nonsense. Quelle shock, it gathered a big, loyal following, offered over 2.5 million copies (solely on PC), and made all its growth prices again in underneath 9 days.
However that was six years in the past, and quite a bit has modified since then. Now, all 10 Chambers’ efforts are on Den of Wolves. The group, fashioned of many ex-Payday builders, is making what it calls each a “4-player co-op heist recreation” and a “techno-thriller FPS” the place you play a gang of criminals enacting company espionage, larceny, and generally outright homicide on the vying mega-corporations which have arrange an unregulated monetary district in the midst of the Pacific ocean. It was introduced at The Recreation Awards in 2023, and we’ve seen (and heard) a good quantity from the sport already.
Maybe fittingly for a recreation designed to showcase the perils of energy and cash, my dialog with 10 Chambers’ audio director Simon Viklund shortly turned to monetization strategies in 2025, and the way a lot has modified for builders since GTFO’s uber-successful launch.
“The best way we launched GTFO – you pay for it as soon as, and you’ve got the entire recreation – that was a viable enterprise method for after we have been 9 members of workers,” he tells me. “However now we’re 100 individuals, the burn fee is method greater, and Den of Wolves is a way more formidable recreation. So we’re hoping it turns right into a reside service kind factor.
“It’s not going to be a subscription service, it’s going to be a premium value. Perhaps two-thirds of what triple-A video games normally price. So it’s extra within the degree of GTFO, the Payday video games, and Vermintide – these different first-person co-op video games. That’s the house we’re occupying.
“So, sure, there will probably be microtransactions, most definitely. There will probably be DLC, however nothing that’s pay-to-win, nothing that’s math-fuckery the place, you realize, for 20 bucks you purchase 100 buckazoids after which all the pieces you should purchase within the recreation prices 64 buckazoids, so you may by no means ever do away with all of your buckazoids, so that you all the time have that splinter in your thoughts telling you: ‘I’m leaving cash on the desk on this recreation, I would like to purchase extra buckazoids’. It’s manipulative, stuff like that.”
The trail ahead, then, is to drop extra content material into the sport and provides the participant the selection when to buy. MTX will seemingly be solved within the type of weapon or character skins, and all the pieces will probably be labelled as clearly as potential – and offered in actual forex – in order that you realize precisely what you’re getting in your cash. Oh, and there’ll be no loot packing containers, both. Clearly.
“And there’s actually no playing! So, actually nothing the place it’s like, you realize: ‘I am shopping for this field, and I do not know what’s inside’. We could not sleep at night time if we had that! It is going to be, purely, to maintain the sport alive. Individuals can vote with their cash. Our dedication is to make good content material that’s good worth for cash. That persons are going to wish to purchase.”
10 Chambers’ has realized from the missteps of different builders, too. Its coverage is that for those who purchase DLC that unlocks new missions or districts so that you can play in, it is possible for you to to host that content material and invite individuals to play who do not have that very same DLC. In a lot the identical method that Hazelight’s video games permit you to get buddies to co-op its video games with out the necessity to purchase a title twice.
“That is so we don’t break up the group into individuals who have the DLC, and do not have the DLC, and stuff like that,” continues Viklund. “So it isn’t going to be shady stuff, you realize. We will be beneficiant. However there must be a way for individuals to maintain supporting the sport.”
What Viklund says in regards to the monetisation facet even performs into the narrative ‘wrapping paper’ that defines Den of Wolves’ world. He envisions the concept of Participant 1 inviting Gamers 2 and three three to a brand new district on this dystopian cyberpunk world as a kind of permit-sharing system, the place the ‘boss’ that’s planning a heist is doing the legwork in getting his legal pals entry to the skyscraper/megastructure the place they’ll be doing their subsequent job.
“You’ll be able to sort-of roleplay issues,” he laughs. “ You don’t say ‘oh I’m matchmaking with different gamers’. No, you are ‘happening to the darkish internet, to seek out companions or legal associates’ or no matter. It’s such a juicy idea, this complete factor with the heists and the legal underworld, you may tie a lot into that theme.”
Den of Wolves is a strong recreation. What I’ve performed to date (please look out for a preview quickly) is a decent, sensible tackle the heist style that’s part-Inception, part-Warmth, part-Payday 2, and part-Management (the Treatment recreation, that’s). Yeah, that blend is a little bit of a headfuck, however that is “the worst model of the sport anybody is ever going to play”, per Viklund, as a result of truth it’s pre-alpha. And it’s nonetheless fairly rattling good. I can’t wait to get my fingers on extra content material.
We all know 10 Chambers makes a good recreation – Overkill’s Payday 1 and a couple of and GTFO are testomony to that – and now the studio is committing to a recreation that it may well help, preserve alive, preserve gamers coming again to. The GTFO hardcore are crying out for extra content material, and so they in all probability won’t ever get it. However, if 10 Chambers’ gambit pays off with reference to the way it desires to fund and gas Den of Wolves, nicely… maybe the most effective of the studio is but to return.
Den of Wolves is ready to launch into Early Entry quickly. It’s going to launch for PC, however no window has been given on the time of writing.
