One of the many game studios smashed to pieces by Embracer Group has come back to life. Campfire Cabal, which was seemingly shut down in 2023 as part of their parent corporation’s scorched earth “restructuring” policy, have crawled out of the grave to announce they’re still around and, in fact, “never stopped working”. They’ve been making a new game in the Expeditions series of historical RPGs, and have been given “the green light to scale back up and transition into full production.”
“We are finally ready to reveal that Campfire Cabal was never shut down,” say the studio in a post on their website. What happened, they say, is that the THQ-owned studio were ordered to close by Embracer two years ago. But some agreement was reached to keep the company going with a reduced headcount, and they instead cut an unknown number of employees from payroll.
“Though we did have to say goodbye to many of our colleagues, the studio survived and a compact team continued the project we had started in 2022. At the end of March of 2025, we received the green light to scale back up and transition into full production.”
That project is a new game in the Expeditions series of RPGs, which includes the classical centurion stomping of Expeditions: Rome, the top-down shield-battering of Expeditions: Viking, and gunpowdery land-grabbing of Expeditions: Conquistador. The studio aren’t saying much more about the new game, though. Only that it’ll be “set in a new period of our history and in a new part of the world for the series”. Expeditions: Mongol, anyone? Expeditions: Pirate? Expeditions: Islamic Golden Age? I guess we’ll find out.
Expeditions: Rome had some repetitive quirks but was a “seriously good – and lovingly detailed – romp through centurion times,” said Nate in our review. And Expeditions: Conquistador was called “very fine” by Adam, who wrote in his review that some parts were a chore, but “the focus on stories and characters means that there is almost always at least one interesting plot on the boil”.
You should know, however, that Campfire Cabal aren’t the original studio who made the older Expeditions games. That would be Logic Artists, who were subsumed and digested by blockchain bullshit peddlars Dynasty Studios. But the Cabal have since become custodians of the series under rights-holders THQ. As with many creative studios, it’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, somewhat complicated by a round of layoffs and this subsequent reappearance. We’ll have to wait and see how the next entry carries the torch.
Even if you aren’t that interested in the RPGs, the “revival” of a seemingly shuttered studio is interesting in a wider sense. It could be seen as a hopeful sprout of green emerging from a blackened earth laid bare by years of seemingly endless layoffs. Or it could simply be the re-emergence of a scarred and injured body from a bloody-watered moat, a studio bravely limping on in spite of the brutal overlord that threw them in there, alongside a bunch of other bodies.
