Twelve years ago this week, three of us sat in a rented Capitol Hill garage and typed the first lines of what would become Neon Drift. We had quit our jobs at three different AAA studios, pooled our savings, and made a single promise to each other: we would only ever make games we actually wanted to play.
A decade later, that promise still holds. NeonHive is now 28 people, fully team-owned, and has shipped 18 titles across PC, console and mobile. More than nine million players have spent time inside the worlds we built. We have won 34 industry awards and lost far more than that. We have never been acquired, never taken publisher funding, and never shipped a single loot box.
This year we are slowing down to speed up. Two new projects enter full production in 2026 - and one of them is a genre we have never made before.
Looking back: what we shipped in 2025
Last year was the busiest in studio history. We shipped StarForge Legends update 1.4 with a complete combat overhaul, three
seasonal content drops for Hive Defender, the free Static Bloom: Director's Cut remaster, and the surprise mobile
launch of Neon Pulse on iOS and Android.
Behind the scenes, we also:
- Migrated HiveEngine to full DirectX 12 Ultimate support
- Hired four new full-time team members across art, engineering and audio
- Hit our four-day work week productivity targets for the third year running
- Donated $84,000 to child literacy charities through our community stream
Looking forward: the 2026-2027 roadmap
For the first time in studio history, we are publicly committing to a release window for two unannounced titles. Both have been in quiet pre-production for over a year, and both move into full production this autumn.
Project Aria - our first narrative horror game
Aria is a first-person narrative horror experience set in a derelict orbital research station. It is the first time we have built a game around fear as the primary emotion, and the writing team has been working with a horror consultant for the past 14 months to make sure we get the pacing right. Target release: late 2027, PC and next-gen consoles.
Project Loom - a co-op crafting sandbox
Loom is a four-player cooperative crafting sandbox built on top of the HiveEngine procedural systems we developed for StarForge. It is the most ambitious project we have ever attempted, and the team is small by design - eight people, no crunch, ship-when-it's-ready philosophy. Target release: 2028.
Console-exclusive partnership
We can also confirm that we have signed our first ever console-exclusive partnership for an unannounced title launching in 2027. We will share more details - including which platform, and why we said yes - in a dedicated announcement later this autumn.
What does not change
The roadmap above is exciting, but the things that do not change are the ones that matter most. We will remain independent and team-owned. We will keep our four-day work week. We will keep shipping weekly devlogs. We will keep answering player messages ourselves. And we will keep making games we want to play.
Thank you for being part of the first twelve years. The next twelve start now.
- Maya Okafor, Creative Director
