Why squad tactics belongs to small studios

Start with the record, because it is bleaker than people remember.

Mythos Games made X-COM. It closed in 2001, when the publisher it depended on was bought and the buyer dropped its follow-up, a 3D remake called The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge. The unfinished work was sold on and became somebody else's game. Julian Gollop, who had designed the original, started again with a company called Codo Technologies.

Sir-Tech made Jagged Alliance 2. Its American publishing arm closed in 1998, before the game came out. The Canadian studio that actually built it kept going until late 2003 and then filed for bankruptcy. Interplay published Fallout Tactics in 2001 and closed Black Isle Studios two years later. Of the four games this studio is named after, not one was made by a company that still exists.

This is not only a story about the old days and bad publishing deals.

Mimimi Games made the three best real-time stealth tactics games of the last decade. On 29 August 2023, twelve days after releasing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, the founders announced they were winding the studio down. The reason they gave was not a flop. It was the toll that fifteen years of increasingly ambitious games had taken on them and their families.

Drop Bear Bytes released Broken Roads, a post-apocalyptic tactics role-playing game, in April 2024. It landed at 61 on Metacritic. The studio went into administration in February 2025.

Here is the other half of the record. Into the Breach came from Subset Games, which is two people. Battle Brothers came from Overhype Studios, which is three. Underrail is essentially one developer's life's work. Kenshi was one person for most of its development, and RimWorld started as one person's project.

Those five games are among the most respected strategy releases of the last fifteen years, and between them they have outsold a great deal of what big studios shipped in the same period. Something about this genre suits a team that size.

A squad tactics game spends its money in an unusual place. The expensive part is not spectacle. It is systems that interlock without contradicting each other, and then enough content to justify them. Neither of those costs scale down nicely with a bigger team, and the first one gets actively worse: a rules system is easiest to keep coherent when very few people are changing it.

What it does not need is what big budgets buy. No cinematic animation budget, no facial capture, no open world streaming technology, no voice cast of hundreds. The camera is far away, the characters are small, and the fidelity players care about is whether the numbers are honest.

The audience is the other half of it. It is small, it is expert, it has thirty years of reference points, and it will forgive ugly graphics and not forgive a rule that makes no sense. That is a terrible audience to try to reach with a marketing budget and an excellent one to make a game for.

Big-budget tactics games do get made, and nearly all of them arrive attached to a brand that was already paid for. XCOM came back under 2K with the name it inherited. Gears Tactics, Marvel's Midnight Suns, Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle, and a steady run of Warhammer licences are all the same deal: the genre is considered too small to carry a release on its own, so it rides something that is not.

That is a rational decision and it has a cost. A licensed tactics game has to keep the licence's audience comfortable, which is the opposite of what the genre is good at. The games people still argue about twenty years later are the ones that were allowed to be unfriendly.

If you read enough reviews of small tactics games, the same complaint comes up more than any other, and it is never that the combat is bad. It is that there is not enough game. The systems are interesting, the fighting works, and it runs out.

That is the shape of the risk for a small team. Systems are the part you can do with few people and a long time. Content volume is the part that money buys, and the part that cannot be faked. Anyone working at this size who tells you otherwise has not shipped yet.

Dead Media is an independent studio and RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished.

We have read the record above carefully, including the part about studios that worked themselves to a stop and the part about games that ran out halfway. Nothing on this site will promise a date, a price or a feature until it exists. That is not caution for its own sake. It is the one lesson this history actually teaches.