As we get closer to the release of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, it's been revealed the series was almost a complete non-starter. Developer Shift Up struggled to gather enough investment to ship the first action game, with the company's boss saying the financial runway got perilously short at one point.
Speaking to Inven, as translated by Automaton, Hyung-Tae Kim, CEO of Shift Up, talks about the timeline for the first installment. Essentially, investors and publishers believed the project was too big a risk for the studio and denied requests to get monetarily involved. According to him, some even suggested if the team pivoted, they'd be more interested. Several major publishers, who are unnamed here, apparently turned the game down.
"While we were developing Stellar Blade, there was a time when the company was in a situation where we could only pay salaries for about three months," he mentions. The sequence of events is murky here, but it seems likely he's talking around 2020 to 2021.
Stellar Blade had been revealed as Project Eve, but was still years away from coming out. The 2022 release Goddess of Victory: Nikke, a free-to-play RPG with gacha mechanics, brought in tens of millions of US dollars soon after hitting the market, providing plenty of help in keeping Shift Up afloat.
After rejection upon rejection, Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios and head of PlayStation Indie, got his hands on a playable build, and offered a publishing deal. The rest is literal history; Kim was given a presidential commendation in December 2025 for services to the South Korean games industry.
He pins the company's prosperity squarely on that of the players who enjoy its games. And rightly so, it's those communities that are ultimately keeping the lights on. Stellar Blade's Switch 2 port is on the way, and Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is in development.
There's at least one other, untitled project happening as well. Thankfully, it seems the people making it have a lot longer than three months to get it done.
Stellar Blade boss offers to help PlatinumGames make Bayonetta 4.
