We have interesting news about Lies of P’s creator, Korean game company Round 8 Studios.
ResetEra user Neha shared a link to the news article from Korean news website EBN News, and provided this translation on the forum:
“According to the game industry on the 29th, Round 8 will release the ‘Lies of P’ DLC (downloadable content) in the first quarter of next year. As the DLC release approaches, interest in Round 8’s next work is also present.
To develop its next work, Round 8 is hiring talents such as level designers and scenario planners.
According to the announcement, Round 8 introduced its next work as a ‘survival horror project set in a SF world’ and announced that it will utilize Unreal Engine 5, targeting PC and console platforms.
‘SF survival horror’ is a genre that has a solid fan base in the global game market. ‘Dead Space’ by Electronic Arts of the United States is a representative example, and domestic game company Krafton also challenged this genre with ‘Callisto Protocol’ in 2022.
A Neowiz official said, “It is still too early to disclose the progress of the project,” and “It is one of the PC and console games that Round 8 Studio is preparing.””
To be clear, EBN News is a legitimate Korean news outlet, and we do trust Neha’s translation. But EBN’s report is itself a rumor. They have an official statement from Neowiz as well responding to the rumor.
Round 8 and publisher Neowiz are certainly still on cloud 9 after the success of Lies of P. As of October 2023, the game had sold one million copies, and that number has definitely gone up since. Round 8 previewed the Lies of P DLC all the way back in November 2023, so we have definitely been waiting a while for it.
We don’t know if Round 8 has created an expansion for Lies of P at the same scale as FromSoftware’s Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, but they could at least deliver on the cliffhanger they left at the game’s ending. As some fans have opined, it certainly looked like it was hinting at the entry of Frank L. Baum’s Oz to intersect with their version of Collodi’s Pinocchio. It just so happens that Oz is trending in pop culture again, so they might benefit, intentionally or not, from a wicked coincidence.
But it’s certainly exciting to know that Round 8 Studios wants to expand and make many different kinds of games, not just more Soulslikes and maso-core games. They seem pretty capable in delivering to player expectations, so we could be looking at the next big AA or even lower AAA game developer of the next decade, and one of the first to be coming out of Korea in the near future.