IO Interactive, 007 First Light'ın güçlü lansmanının ardından Project Fantasy'ye yatırım yapıyor.

IO Interactive shipped 007 First Light on May 27 and sold 1.5 million copies inside two days. The studio's biggest remaining team is already deep into Project Fantasy, an online fantasy RPG it announced back in 2023. Both projects come from a developer who has spent two decades making games with almost nothing in common.

007 First Light Chapter

007 First Light was released on May 27 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S/X, going live at 7:00 AM PDT in Los Angeles and 3:00 PM BST in the UK, after early access opened a day earlier at 14:00 UTC for everyone who pre-ordered outside Australia and New Zealand. IO Interactive reported 1.5 million copies in two days across all platforms and led Steam's sales chart until Forza Horizon 6 passed it. Reports put the budget near $200 million and the break-even point at roughly 3 million copies, so clearing half of that in under 48 hours puts a sequel within reach, and IO had already said the game could get one if players wanted it.

Reviews ran hot. The game holds almost 90% of positive reviews on Steam, with more than 7,000 positive ratings, an 87 on Metacritic, an 88 on OpenCritic, and a concurrent-player peak of 68,477. An earlier Steam snapshot had it near 92% with a peak around 69,000 players, and IO has not yet detailed the financial result. Eurogamer's Rick rated it the studio's best-written game while saying it is not the studio's best overall. Other outlets praised the shootouts, chases, and explosions, compared its cinematic presentation to Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, and called it a frontrunner for Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2026.

The PC launch also drew a fight. IO confirmed Denuvo DRM only after pre-orders had gone live, and players responded by canceling pre-orders, filing refunds, and pulling the game from wishlists across Steam, Reddit, and social platforms. The objection was about timing: critics argued the anti-tamper software should have been disclosed during the pre-purchase phase, not after sales were locked in, which they read as a transparency problem on a franchise as visible as Bond. Denuvo has drawn this reaction for years, with players blaming it for weaker performance, longer load times, and limited modding, while publishers defend it as piracy protection during the launch window. Not everyone took that side; some users argued Denuvo does not ruin every game and that developers often have little control over a publisher's DRM call. Some buyers organized wait-and-see threads and said they would reconsider only if the protection comes out later, something a few publishers have done once piracy risk drops. The episode sits inside a longer debate over protecting intellectual property versus keeping player goodwill, and it showed how fast refund systems, wishlists, and live review scores can move sentiment on a launch this size.

IO Interactive's Next Game Is Fantastic (and a Fantasy)

IO's next big project is neither Bond nor Hitman. Its largest remaining development team is building Project Fantasy, which chief development officer Véronique Lallier described, before launch, as bigger than the Hitman team but smaller than the 007 First Light team, a size she said could change after Bond shipped. Eurogamer's Robert Purchese saw concept art on the walls of IO's Brighton studio, one of five offices the company runs across Europe, and caught a creature being animated on a developer's screen.

IO announced Project Fantasy in 2023 as an online fantasy RPG, a world built from the core to expand for many years, then said little about it afterward. The project website still shows a single image: an elf, a human, and a dwarf at the mouth of a cave, looking out at a green, mountainous world, with "Looking for more!" written across the bottom, copying the group-finding call from online multiplayer worlds. Co-owner and chief creative officer Christian Elverdam leads the project, while CEO Hakan Abrak led 007 First Light, splitting the studio's two biggest efforts between its founders. Lallier said a shared passion for fantasy runs through IO's management, with Elverdam closest to the creative vision and a stated aim to do things differently.

"Something that IO is well established for is always coming with different game experiences."

— Véronique Lallier

The idea predates the reveal. Lallier said the project began post-Covid, which lines up with a 2021 report from Windows Central, corroborated by Eurogamer, that IO was building an AAA fantasy game for Xbox Game Studios, set in a large medieval world with dragons and described as years from release. Abrak had teased a third universe that same year during a GI Live keynote, calling it a project his veteran staff had wanted to make.

"It is something our core people... have been dreaming about for some time."

— Hakan Abrak

Lead sound designer Joshua Smith described the goal in one of IO's early developer videos, calling it something that doesn't exist in the space yet and a complete change of direction for a studio known for Hitman.

"We're going to allow you to be things you could never be."

— Joshua Smith

IO Interactive Legacy

IO has built its name on original ideas. Lallier pointed to Freedom Fighters and Mini Ninjas as games the studio started from scratch and noted that 007 First Light is the only one it has made inside an established franchise. Her list skipped the two Kane & Lynch games, the gritty Xbox 360 shooters Eurogamer's Alex Donaldson has called relentlessly miserable yet brilliant. The Hitman trilogy, finished with Hitman 3 in 2021, runs on the same original-IP instinct, a sandbox built around Agent 47 picking off billionaires and warmongering generals before they can do more harm, in a world IO has likened to Bond's.

The company also reshaped how it operates. After Hitman 3, IO moved into self-publishing, opened a Barcelona studio to grow the business and publish other developers, and projected doubling to 400 staff by the time the Bond game shipped. Abrak said in 2021 that IO would likely publish both its own games and other developers' work, and that one of IO's own games could end up published by someone else, an arrangement he called unthinkable a few years earlier. The studio now runs five offices across Europe, including the Brighton location where Project Fantasy art hangs on the walls, and it plans to keep supporting 007 First Light the way it supported Hitman.

Kane & Lynch 2 Moment

The studio's range shows clearest in Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, which turned 15 in August 2025. Donaldson called it the most relentlessly miserable game ever made and meant it as praise. The site's own 2010 review had scored it 4/10 and ranked it below Army of Two: The 40th Day, a co-op shooter twice its length, before the verdict softened into cult status over the following years.

Dog Days shoots its violence through a handheld, shaking camera, with colors blowing out like a worn VHS tape and audio cutting out during the loudest action. Looking into neon signs or bright bulbs flares the footage, and an explosion warps and distorts the lens. Its goriest kills vanish behind a pixelated blur, leaving the player's imagination to supply the worst of it, an effect Donaldson compared to an eastern European horror film and to LiveLeak footage. The four-hour runtime fits the story, an escalating cycle of suffering he argued would buckle under any more length; he compared the short-length debate to the hand-wringing over Mafia: The Old Country and said Dog Days is as long as its story needs. He framed the camera as the viewpoint of a third person standing over Kane and Lynch, which makes the player feel dirty rather than heroic, and set the game beside Spec Ops: The Line as a shooter of its era that had something to say about violence, with no quip or fist-bump in sight.

I see a studio that refuses to sit in one register, which is why a fantasy RPG from the Hitman team reads as a logical next swing rather than a detour.

Keeping 007 First Light Alive After Launch

007 First Light is linear and scripted, which raised a replayability question IO's Hitman sandbox never had to answer. Eurogamer's review flagged it directly, since the Bond game jars against the repeat-friendly design IO built into Hitman. The studio's answer is TacSim, the Tactical Simulations area reached from MI6 headquarters, where a character named Selena Tan offers a list of challenges that remix campaign spaces with new rules and conditions. Senior combat designer Tom Marcham said some of those challenges drop combat into rooms that had no encounter during the story, more than a plain challenge mode.

"TacSim is basically a space in which we can remix our levels."

— Tom Marcham

Lallier tied the plan to the decade of post-launch updates IO gave Hitman's World of Assassination and said TacSim content would arrive after launch alongside a roadmap, with the launch treated as a starting point.

"Launching the game is just the beginning."

— Véronique Lallier

She said IO wants to learn from player feedback and keep the game evolving. Marcham also hopes speedrunning communities will chase the TacSim leaderboards, and IO plans to keep a sizeable team on the game to handle launch issues and feed it new content.

The Risk in Project Fantasy

Project Fantasy carries more risk than anything IO has shipped. Online multiplayer games cost a lot and take years to build, and several big ones stumbled recently: Amazon's New World, BioWare's Anthem, Sony's Concord, and even Destiny 2. It would be IO's first online-service game, and the studio still hasn't said whether it is a massively-multiplayer world or a smaller shared one, nor shown any gameplay, five years after the first reports surfaced. Purchese, a fantasy fan himself, said the project excites him but carries a note of trepidation.

I think the new IP is the right bet, and the online-service model is the most dangerous part of it, given how many of those games have folded.

The studio is keeping its attention on Bond for now. IO plans to hold a 007 First Light team in place to support the game the way it backed Hitman for over a decade, while Elverdam's team keeps building the fantasy world away from public view. Whatever IO ships next probably won't star a superspy or an assassin.