The Blood of Dawnwalker has plenty of flaws, but what the vampire RPG gets right, it really gets right. That makes it all the more remarkable that it was the product of a first-time studio working off a budget of just $40 million.
That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports that NetEase supplied that amount of funding for production in exchange for a 26-percent stake in the studio, Rebel Wolves, many of whose cofounders came from CD Projekt Red, including Witcher 3 director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz.
That’s a decent chunk of change for a startup based in Poland, but money goes fast when a studio swells to 160, Rebel Wolves’ current headcount. Tomaszkiewicz reportedly funded the first year of development in 2022, and the team managed to ship the game by 2026 in part because it stuck to the original vision of a day-night cycle that brings out your vampire powers, and a time limit that gates players from seeing and doing everything in the world in a single playthrough.
It probably helped that so much of the third-person action-RPG design blueprint established in The Witcher 3 could be borrowed where useful for The Blood of Dawnwalker. Rebel Wolves didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, and it still managed to propel its debut game to 1 million sales during the busiest time of year.
“We decided we’d do everything to not change the foundations of the game,” Tomaszkiewicz told Bloomberg. “And the foundations right now are the same as they were in the pitch deck. Because we knew if we changed those pillars, it’ll impact the whole game.”