Story 8: Three days from bankruptcy - the story of King Art

What happens when your breakout hit collides with a publisher’s
sudden bankruptcy—and your runway shrinks to three weeks? For Jan
Theysen of KING Art Games, the HMH collapse turned a million‑euro
royalty forecast into frozen projects and an urgent scramble to
avoid layoffs—until Gameforge’s Klaas Kersting stepped in with a
fast, no‑nonsense browser game deal that bridged the gap and
saved the studio.


In this episode, Jan traces the whiplash arc from Leipzig triumph
to legal limbo: the hard lessons of rights recovery for The Book
of Unwritten Tales, the “never one partner” rule that reshaped
KING Art’s strategy, and why trailer‑driven development and
Kickstarter discipline later became compounding advantages. He
opens the black box on negotiating amid insolvency, building a
deterministic RTS netcode from dusty papers, and how Iron
Harvest’s long tail set the stage for Dawn of War 4.


You will learn:


How to secure IP and ship an add‑on when your publisher goes
under

How a single decisive ally (Klaas Kersting) can de‑risk a
studio at the edge

How diversifying across three projects, partners, genres, and
platforms hedges failure

How trailer‑driven development sharpens focus and pitch
clarity under pressure

Why resilient pipelines turned a crisis into
momentum—culminating in landing a top RTS franchise






Subscribe for the full, uncut and ad-free episodes!


Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/behind_the_scenes_show


Steady: https://steady.page/behindthescenes


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.