The next* publicly traded gaming company will be a bit different

The makers of Goat Simulator prepare for their wildest stunt--and just might show investors a better way to make video games (*Will probably happen; but needs Nasdaq approval)

Goat Simulator 3. Screenshot: Coffee Stain Group

One of the more intriguing subplots of the video game industry’s volatile 2025 is the future of a collection of studios called the Coffee Stain Group.

Coffee Stain is the developer behind Goat Simulator and Satisfactory and the publisher of Valheim—all hit games made by small Scandinavian teams.

And they’re about to be part of what amounts to a public experiment involving their approach to smaller-budget community-driven game development.

More specifically, they’re on the verge of providing a very visible contrast to the approach exemplified by the EAs, Take Twos, Ubisofts and Square Enixes of the world, publicly traded game companies where game budgets can approach the GDP of Tonga.

Coffee Stain is poised to be a standalone public company as well, applying for a listing on Nasdaq First North, where it will test whether their approach can be an investor-pleasing success.

By the end of 2025, Coffee Stain is set to be spun-off from the Swedish gaming conglomerate Embracer Group, resulting in two companies that are planned to be publicly listed:

• Embracer, set to be renamed Fellowship Entertainment, will be a AAA games company, containing all the studios and resources needed for big-budget, big-team game development. They’ll have Tomb Raider and its lead studio Crystal Dynamics. They’ll have former Deus Ex dev studio Eidos, and they’ll have the Lord of the Rings license. Plus: Kingdom Come Deliverance, Metro and Dead Island, among other series, and the studios behind them. Based on an official internal count made at the end of June, the combined group will have around 57 studios and around 7,000 employees.

• Coffee Stain will be a AA gaming company. It’ll include the Goat Simulator and Satisfactory developers, Deep Rock Galactic and its studio Ghost Ship Games, and a publishing division that handles multiplayer Viking survival hit Valheim. A decidedly smaller-scale operation, based on an end-of-June tally, they’ll have 13 studios and around 250 employees.

Earlier this week, Embracer published a brochure for its investors that outlines—in as rosy a way as possible, of course—the potential for the Coffee Stain operation.

It is inherently a promotional document, meant to excite stockholders as Embracer prepares to distribute shares of Coffee Stain to Embracer shareholders early next month (and ahead of a mid-November capital markets day that’s intended to further hype Coffee Stain to the investor class).

Nevertheless, in a time of industry struggle, where mega-budgets, mega-failures and some mega-mergers have led to years of layoffs and studio shutdowns, the brochure makes for provocative reading. It’s a suggestion of a different way of doing the video game business, an approach that’s hard not to root for.

Here’s the gist of what Coffee Stain is about and what a Coffee Stain-style publicly traded video game corporation can be, from the brochure (emphasis added):