Housemarque’s Ilari Kuittinen bets on a FromSoftware-style growth arc for Saros

Housemarque studio head and co-founder Ilari Kuittinen is making a specific argument about Saros: don’t judge the game by launch momentum alone. In a new interview with The Game Business, Kuittinen and the team behind Saros say they understand the studio has not matched the same commercial success as other first-party PlayStation games. They also claim something that is easy to say and harder to believe until it happens: their games find an audience over time rather than all at once at launch.

That mindset is Kuittinen’s bridge from Housemarque to the most relevant comparison in modern action gaming: FromSoftware. He points to the studio’s own long climb, starting with King’s Field on the original PlayStation in 1994, then expanding through more King’s Field games and the long-running mecha series Armored Core, before breakout success accelerated with 2009's Demon's Souls, followed by the Dark Souls trilogy, and then the even bigger audience moments of Bloodborne and Elden Ring. In Kuittinen’s telling, the shape of the journey matters more than the shortcut to the destination. He is explicit about not presuming Housemarque will be “anywhere close” to FromSoftware, but he also says Housemarque will “keep our core” and keep educating the market that its games are among the coolest games people can play.

For decision-makers, this is not just fan-service narrative. It is a signal about operating assumptions. Housemarque is positioning Saros inside a genre and market reality that can look slow or underwhelming early, but still create a durable brand if the product is consistently excellent and the audience expands through word-of-mouth, discovery, and repeat play. Kuittinen’s line about “flow states” being “really cool” is essentially a go-to-market thesis. The studio is arguing that it has to teach the market what the games are good at, and that can take time.

It helps that Housemarque’s history gives them credibility in that argument. The team has been around for 30 years, but it only really “began to find its voice” as a studio in 2013 with Resogun. Since then, the company has leaned into fast-paced, intense shooters that have largely earned critical praise. The first PS5 game, Returnal, is a key anchor for the strategy. It performed well enough that PlayStation acquired Housemarque in 2021. That acquisition detail matters because it suggests platform owners were willing to bet on the studio’s long-term potential, even if the commercial story is not identical to every other PlayStation first-party launch.

Now add the second-order complication: Saros is described as part of a different kind of challenge. Housemarque is not presenting itself as a copy of FromSoftware’s exact genre path, and it is not claiming the same kind of immediate mainstream breakout. It is acknowledging a niche. And niches behave differently financially because they can have delayed reach, uneven early conversion, and a higher reliance on sustained visibility. That changes how boards and exec teams should think about KPIs like initial unit sales versus longer-tail engagement, community growth, replayability metrics, and the cost of educating the market.

There is also a platform dynamics angle. The acquisition by PlayStation in 2021 indicates that Sony saw strategic value in Housemarque’s pattern: consistently difficult, highly replayable games with distinct identity. Housemarque’s comment about “keeping our core” reads like a commitment to not sanding off difficulty or style for faster mass appeal. For execs, that is the trade: protect differentiation and risk slower early adoption, or smooth the edges and potentially dilute what makes the product discoverable to the right players.

Finally, look at what Housemarque is actually saying about what comes next. The article notes that it remains to be seen what is next for the studio, but it “does seem like it will continue to lean into its strengths” by making highly replayable and difficult shooters. That is consistent with the FromSoftware analogy, where incremental mastery and genre familiarity helped the audience grow. The strategic stakes for peers in similar roles are obvious: if you are underwriting a niche studio, you need a forecast that can handle “slow rise to prominence,” not just launch-week performance.

In other words, Kuittinen is asking stakeholders to underwrite patience. Not blind faith, but a particular model of growth where education and community take time to compound. If the Saros bet lands, the payoff is not only revenue. It is brand durability and a repeatable pipeline in a category where the hardest part is getting people to even understand why your game is special, before they decide to pick it up.