Coffee Stain Group Rescues Chronicles: Medieval From Bankruptcy With $5.4 Million Auction Buyout
Barely two weeks after Copenhagen-based developer Raw Power Games collapsed into bankruptcy, its ambitious open-world medieval sandbox Chronicles: Medieval has officially been pulled back from the brink. Following a court-supervised asset auction handled by Danish bankruptcy trustees in November 2026, Swedish publisher Coffee Stain Group won the bidding war with an upfront cash offer of 36.75 million Danish kroner (DKK), roughly $5.4 million USD (around €4.93 million), securing full ownership of the intellectual property and production assets.
From October's Sudden Funding Collapse to the Copenhagen Auction
The crisis began on October 30, 2026, when Raw Power Games, a Danish studio founded by industry veterans with credits across Grand Theft Auto, The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed, Hitman, and Red Dead Redemption 2, announced that its primary financial backing had unexpectedly fallen through right as production neared the finish line. First revealed during Summer Game Fest with a cinematic trailer narrated by actor Tom Hardy, Chronicles: Medieval had quickly climbed the wishlists on its official Steam store page.
Unable to secure emergency bridge financing within the strict window mandated by Danish insolvency rules, the studio formally filed for bankruptcy shortly afterward. That filing triggered an immediate auction of the studio's technology and game assets in November 2026, opening the door for a Nordic neighbor to step in.
Check Chronicles: Medieval deals on Allkeyshop→
A New Joint Venture Split 75% Coffee Stain and 25% Original Developers
Rather than shelving the IP or handing the codebase to an unfamiliar external team, Coffee Stain Group (the Swedish powerhouse behind Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, and Satisfactory, which recently launched crossplay across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in Patch 1.2.5.0) has established a dedicated new company to finish the game. Under the terms of the restructuring, Coffee Stain holds a 75% majority stake in the new entity, while a core group of key developers from Raw Power Games retains the remaining 25% equity.
Keeping the original leads invested as minority shareholders solves the biggest risk of any bankruptcy buyout: institutional memory. Instead of spending months reverse-engineering bespoke tools, the surviving core team can pick up right where production paused with full publishing backing.
Unreal Engine 5, Proprietary Asgard Tech, and the Road to Steam Early Access
What made Chronicles: Medieval worth 36.75 million DKK in cash is the maturity of its underlying foundation. The action-RPG pairs Unreal Engine 5 visuals with Asgard, a proprietary simulation technology engineered by the Danish team to handle massive real-time medieval battles, cavalry charges, troop formations, and large-scale castle sieges.
Coffee Stain's buyout fully funds the remaining development cycle through its upcoming PC Early Access launch on Steam. While the project originally targeted a late 2026 window that could now spill into the 2027 video game release calendar, the newly formed studio will share an updated launch timeline on the game's official channels once the transition is complete.
My Field Notes
Grimtag and I were just talking the other night about how rare it is to see a distressed studio buyout actually make industrial sense on both sides of the balance sheet, and Coffee Stain just pulled off a masterclass. Picking up a nearly completed Unreal Engine 5 medieval sandbox with its own custom large-scale battle architecture for $5.4 million is an absolute bargain in today's development economy. More importantly, the publisher that turned Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic into word-of-mouth juggernauts on Steam was smart enough to carve out 25% equity for the core Raw Power Games architects. You can buy a license at a bankruptcy auction, but without the engineers who built the Asgard battle tech from scratch, even the most promising Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord contender would be dead in the water.
Originally from Lyon, France, gaming journalist Bastien "Orion" relocated nearly a decade ago to Quebec City's Saint-Roch district, right in the heart of eastern Canada's development studio hub. Before crossing the Atlantic, he honed his versatile reporting style across classic French gaming web portals and specialist television outlets in the 2000s and 2010s, notably with JeuxVideo.fr and JeuxNews. Equally passionate about AAA blockbusters, North American studio culture, retro preservation, and community modding projects, he anchors Pro-Gamer's transatlantic desk and real-time coverage of US and Japanese industry announcements.
