Hazelight Has Already Started Production on Its Next Game After Split Fiction

Hazelight Studios founder Josef Fares has confirmed on X that development has begun on the studio’s fourth game, sharing a photo of himself in a motion-capture suit alongside three actors with their faces deliberately hidden. There is no title, genre or platform list yet, but the post confirms the Swedish studio behind It Takes Two and Split Fiction is already shooting performance capture for its next project.

What Fares has said

“Next game in the making,” was the extent of the official reveal, but Fares has been more candid in interviews. Speaking with The Game Business, he described the project as already better than Split Fiction: “I can easily say that our next game is better than Split Fiction. We’re on a good path.”

He has also talked about Hazelight’s internal culture of encouraging developers to experiment and break things during production without it derailing the final game, something he credits for the studio’s run of critically acclaimed releases. The mocap photo suggests the new game will again be built around a small cast of characters, which fits every Hazelight game so far, but the studio has not confirmed whether it will once again be a co-op only experience.

Hazelight by the numbers

In April 2026, Hazelight announced it had passed 50 million games shipped across its catalog. It Takes Two, the 2021 Game of the Year winner at The Game Awards, accounts for 30 million of that total, A Way Out for 13 million, and Split Fiction for 7 million.

Split Fiction launched in March 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and later came to Nintendo Switch 2. It sold 2 million copies in its first week and passed 4 million within about two months, a faster start than It Takes Two. Like its predecessors, it requires two players, either online or on the couch, and uses the Friend’s Pass so a second player can join for free.

Where this fits

Fares has said in the past that once a game ships, he is mentally already on to the next one, and that pattern holds here too: production reportedly began not long after Split Fiction’s launch. At that pace, and based on the three to four-year gaps between Hazelight’s previous releases, players should not expect the new game soon.

Fares has also pushed back publicly on criticism of EA, Hazelight’s publisher across all three of its games, calling the collaboration “super good” and arguing EA gets more backlash than it deserves relative to other major publishers. EA itself is now privately owned after its $55 billion take-private closed in August 2026, which makes Hazelight one of the most valuable studios in the new EA’s portfolio.

Why it matters

Hazelight has never missed with a release, and each game has raised the bar creatively and commercially for co-op design. A studio this confident, this early in a new project, is worth watching closely, even with zero official details yet.

For players who share consoles with friends or family, a common setup in the region, Hazelight’s couch co-op focus remains one of the best reasons to keep an eye on this project.