People Can Fly has acquired Cooldown Games and will create a new publishing division, the Polish studio behind Outriders and Bulletstorm announced.

The deal adds another development team to People Can Fly's growing operation, which already spans multiple studios across Poland, the UK, the US, Canada and Ukraine. For Cooldown Games, the acquisition places the smaller team inside a group with deep experience in AAA work-for-hire and original IP.

What does the acquisition change?

The immediate operational change is headcount and capacity: People Can Fly absorbs Cooldown Games' team and its leadership into a group that has spent recent years scaling up through exactly this kind of consolidation. The studio has historically grown through acquisitions and new office openings rather than organic hiring alone.

The bigger strategic signal is the second half of the announcement. By creating a publishing division, People Can Fly moves beyond its long-standing model of developing titles under publishing partners such as Square Enix, which handled Outriders, and Epic Games, which published Bulletstorm and worked with the studio on Fortnite content.

For a studio of its size, bringing publishing in-house typically means taking on marketing, user acquisition, community management and platform relationships directly — functions previously owned by external partners. That shift changes the economics of every future original project: higher upfront risk and cost, but a larger share of revenue and full control of monetization, pricing and release timing.

Why does the publishing move matter now?

Mid-size independent developers across Europe and North America have been pulling publishing functions in-house as digital storefront terms, live-service operations and direct-to-player channels make self-publishing viable without retail infrastructure. Unreal Engine developers in particular have benefited from direct storefront relationships on PC.

People Can Fly's decision fits that pattern. A developer with multiple simultaneous projects, established engine expertise in Unreal Engine, and a track record of shipped live-service titles (Outriders launched in 2021 and received major post-release content) has most of the technical capability self-publishing requires already in place.

The open question is what the new division will publish first. The company has not detailed which upcoming titles will move to self-publishing versus remaining with external partners, nor has it named a head of the new division or disclosed the financial terms of the Cooldown Games deal.

What happens next?

Watch for two announcements in the near term: the first project confirmed under the new publishing division, and clarity on whether Cooldown Games will work on original IP or support People Can Fly's existing pipeline. Both will signal whether this is a full strategic pivot toward independent publishing or a limited experiment alongside continued partner-funded development.