Dead Cells entered early access more than two years ago, and it’s still being updated with new weapons, enemies, areas. This wasn’t the plan. Dead Cells was not supposed to go on for years. But the massive success o f Dead Cells caught developer Motion Twin by surprise, and so this past August, they made a big change. Dead Cells would live on, but no longer be developed by Motion Twin. Instead, the future of Dead Cells—future game updates, potential sequels, whatever—would be handled by a new studio called Evil Empire.

Evil Empire isn’t a bunch of newbies, but made up of a handful of Motion Twin employees who wanted to continue working on Dead Cells, while Motion Twin itself moved on. It’s being led by Motion Twin’s now-former head of marketing, Steve Filby, and despite being spun-off from Motion Twin, it’s still subject to their approval; Motion Twin weighs-in on and signs off on their creative decisions when it comes to Dead Cells.

Critically, though, Evil Empire is not something Motion Twin was and remains: a co-op.

“There's a lot of reasons for that, though the main one is directly related to scaling,” said Filby in a recent interview with me about Evil Empire’s decision making. “While I am literally having heart palpitations thinking about all the work, the aim of the Evil Empire team has always been to grow and to be able to go past the 8-10 person limit of the Motion Twin model.”

A co-op pushes back on traditional corporate structures, in video game companies or otherwise, in which some are paid more than others, some have financial investment in the studio that could later pay off with a hit (or if the company is sold) and others do not. In broad strokes, a co-op tries to flatten things and put everyone on the same playing field, including economically. The vast, vast majority of video game companies are not co-ops. It’s a rare concept precisely because it runs counter to society’s traditional understandings of power dynamics.