Alexander Mishulin, Owlcat co-founder and creative director, is drawing a bright line: Owlcat "will continue to make CRPGs because we love them" and "we do not want to become stagnant." That matters because Owlcat also appears to be expanding fast, with reports placing the studio at around 600 employees as it gears up for two RPG projects at once.

In other words, Owlcat is trying to do the hard thing at scale. Mishulin frames the strategy as iterative reinvention: the studio wants "to be trying different approaches for our RPG games, trying to find the best possible fit for the idea of the game." The headline implication is simple. If the industry narrative is often that studios eventually drift away from what made them famous, Mishulin is explicitly betting against that drift, even as Owlcat moves into a more heavyweight operating mode.

That “drift risk” has a real, market-shaped backdrop. Owlcat's first three games share an engine, design sensibility, and structure that follow a monarch or otherwise leading a state-level organization. That is the house style that put Owlcat on the map. But one of its current efforts, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, is described as a huge, if exciting, departure, even if it still shares DNA. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is characterized as Mass Effect-like, and it represents Owlcat trading ruler fantasy plus light 4X elements for a more reactive detective or investigation metagame.

So Mishulin's promise is not “we'll never change.” It is “we won't abandon the hardcore CRPG audience while we change.” The second project in development, Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy, helps make that more concrete. It is said to iterate on Owlcat's CRPG engine and on the ruleset of Rogue Trader in a way that echoes Owlcat's earlier transition from Pathfinder: Kingmaker to Wrath of the Righteous. That matters because those earlier moves showed the studio could expand its CRPG ambitions while still staying rooted in systems-driven gameplay.

The scaling piece is the operational pressure. Both PCGamesN and Wccftech have reported Owlcat currently consists of around 600 employees, with PC Gamer noting it is in the “heavyweight division” range. Larian has been north of 500 employees at last check-in, and Obsidian has been in the low 200s after Microsoft's latest layoffs. CD Projekt Red is cited at 1,134 worldwide employees (per a 2024 fact sheet), and its Warsaw heartland studio is said to have 615 employees (per a 2023 financial statement). BioWare is described as likely pushing 500-600 headcount in the 2010s, with post-Veilguard layoffs leaving it at 100 or fewer employees. None of this is about tidy comparisons. It is about the stress test: when studios grow, budgets and expectations rise. When studios cut, they often narrow risk. Owlcat is doing neither. It is growing while also splitting attention across two RPG projects simultaneously.

There is also an organizational “how” question hiding inside the “how many” number. The source notes it is unclear how many separate offices Owlcat's staff is spread across. Owlcat was originally founded in Moscow, and it is currently headquartered in Paphos, Cyprus. That geography and staffing structure can influence how quickly teams share knowledge, converge on design standards, and prevent fragmentation between teams working on different gameplay visions. If one project is building something Mass Effect-like, while the other is leaning into a detective metagame and Warhammer 40K rules, coordination becomes a competitive advantage or a recurring budget leak.

Strategically, Owlcat is implicitly borrowing a playbook from franchises that successfully run multiple RPG “modes” under one roof. The source suggests an analogy to BioWare's golden years, when Mass Effect and Dragon Age could coexist under the same organizational identity. But Owlcat's version of that logic has a sharper edge, because the studio is not just shipping different genres. It is shipping different RPG shapes: monarch-state leadership structure in earlier games, versus The Expanse: Osiris Reborn's more Mass Effect-like departures, versus Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy's systems iteration tied to Rogue Trader.

For decision-makers tracking RPG studios, the stake is straightforward: can a company keep a coherent hardcore CRPG brand while scaling staffing and running parallel development on two very different experiences? Mishulin's words are a commitment to not become stagnant and to “try different approaches,” which suggests the studio sees experimentation as the path to staying relevant, not a threat to identity. If Owlcat pulls it off, it becomes a template for other ambitious studios facing the same dilemma: keep the core audience, broaden the design space, and still execute with enough manpower to actually finish the work.