Thunderful Gothenburg announced today that it has rebranded with a new name: Stormteller Games. According to the studio, this new name signifies a new chapter in its history, describing the rainy weather of Gothenburg while simultaneously paying tribute to Thunderful. The studio plans to launch its first game under its new title, Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, later this year.
GamesBeat spoke with studio head Johan Petersson about the rebrand, and he said that the entire studio participated in the rebrand: “One thing we’ve done that that has been quite great over the past year — and it’s basically taken a year to get to this point — is that we involved everybody, to make sure it represents everyone in the studio. We started back last spring, just brainstorming with everybody who wanted to be part of this. And it was clear pretty early that they wanted to tie it back to Gothenburg.”
Thunderful Gothenburg itself began in 2017 from a merger of Image & Form and Zoink! Games — and, as Petersson says, the two studios never really connected in a new culture after the merge, both having different approaches to game development. As such, the rebrand in part helped to properly coalesce the two studios into a single entity, though he noted that they had to delay due to Thunderful’s less-than-favorable 2024 — the studio restructured twice during the year and laid off hundreds of people.
Petersson told GamesBeat that the studio plans to approach games from a gameplay-first perspective, adding that they’ve also iterated on the new Lost in Random title based on player feedback from the first game. “Our approach now is we try to take the best parts of both studios as we move forward. One of the things I’ve always been really adamant about is making sure we have a sustainable approach to making games, so making sure we don’t end up with crunch in the end… We also approach games gameplay first, so kind of iterating until we find the fun in the games we’re making.”
