Communications manager Christopher Grünewald explains why pirate city builder Corsair Cove has succeeded where Park Beyond fell short
In December 2025, German developer Limbic Entertainment was sold by Bandai Namco to a "private investor". This news came just over three years after the Japanese giant acquired a majority stake in the studio for an undisclosed sum.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom 2026, Limbic communications manager Christopher Grünewald said that there's no animosity between the two companies, adding that Bandai Namco is "super happy" that the studio has seen success with its recently released Corsair Cove.
Limbic retained all of its IP after the split, meaning that the studio can do "whatever we want" with Corsair Cove, "which is the best thing, because the game is successful now," Grünewald says.
Moving to being an independent studio wasn't a big shift for Limbic; founded in 2002, the company was self-owned for almost 20 years, and is fast approaching its 24th birthday.
"We know how it is to be independent," Grünewald says. "It made sense for us to be a part of Bandai Namco, especially as long as we worked on Park Beyond together. It's not that it's super scary for us now, or not like we've never done this before. It has its advantages, but it's also scary because you no longer have infinite funding for everything."
Limbic – even before it was sold by Bandai Namco – has seen support from the German state, which has certainly eased any anxieties about not having enough money. "That's pretty good because that is something that Germany never had before, unlike other countries," Grünewald explains. "That helps, absolutely. There was also no need to find funding for finishing Corsair Cove – this was already done – but we needed, of course, a publisher to handle the PR stuff on an international scale – everything I cannot do alone."
Corsair Cove recently hit 200,000 sales, less than a month after its release on July 31. Grünewald says this is "really good" adding that the game still has around 700,000 wishlists on Steam.
"We only announced the game in April, so there was less than four months until release," he says. "In that time we reached half a million wishlists, which is just awesome. We still have 85% positive reviews on Steam, which is also amazing." The game is targeted at a global audience, but has become "pretty big" in China. "In the scale of China, it's not big, of course, but if like 0.001% of the Chinese people love your game, it's still big," Grünewald says. "It still makes sense."
He adds that Corsair Cove has also done well in both Japan and the United States; this is all important for Limbic given the historic audience for these kinds of games.
"It's good to see because for a long time, the biggest market and the only market that made sense for strategy games, especially for city-building games, was Germany and Europe in general," Grünewald explains. "It's cool that we have fans worldwide who love to play the game."
As for why Corsair Cove has done well, there are a few reasons. Grünewald says that has heard from its audience that the game "feels really fresh".
"This is something it's really hard to do," he says. "There are so many city builders in the last few years because it's a successful genre, even if it's still a niche genre. When we released the demo, everyone was saying it feels so fresh, it feels new, and this is amazing." The other major factor is that the game launched "absolutely polished at release".
"Performance was good, there were no bugs, no game breakers," Grünewald says. "This was absolutely important because that was the biggest issue for Park Beyond. We do not hide that. Everyone knows that we released a game that wasn't in the best state. And this was our biggest learning: cut the content at some point and just have a game that people can have fun with without any performance issues. This is so important today."
There's also the small matter of there not really being any other pirate city builders, something that no doubt has helped Corsair Cove stand out.
