Summer Game Fest opened with a slate of Souls-like announcements. Three were already known; two were genuine surprises; one — from a studio with no prior public profile — drew the loudest crowd reaction of the day.
Industry analysts at NPD Group tracked 14% year-over-year growth in the Souls-like category. The growth is attributed to a combination of strong post-launch updates and price-conscious holiday buying, though analysts caution against extrapolating to other genres.
The latest update for Lies of P brings substantial changes to the matchmaking system. Players who relied on the previous build will need to rethink their habits, but Round8 Studio framed the change as part of a broader balance pass rather than a one-off fix.
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Reader comments
AM
Aryan MacDonald2026-06-15
NPD Group flagging 14% year-over-year Souls-like growth while also cautioning against genre extrapolation is doing a lot of hedging in one sentence. What’s the actual argument here — that Round8 is in a healthy market but facing internal risk, or that the market itself might not hold? The article title suggests developer stress, but the excerpt reads more like a category overview. Those are two pretty different stories.
ND
Naoko Donnelly2026-06-15
The framing of ’at what cost’ feels premature when we don’t even have a release window yet. Round8 shipped Lies of P with a skeleton crew by AAA standards and nailed it — I’d rather see the article dig into *why* the studio might be under strain than lean on vague industry analyst quotes from NPD Group about 14% category growth. That stat is about the whole Souls-like market, not Round8’s internal capacity.
GS
Gregory Spencer2026-06-15
Played through Lies of P on PS5 and the thing that stuck with me wasn’t the difficulty — it was how tightly the team controlled the atmosphere in every single zone. Scaling that up for a sequel without burning out the people who built it is a real concern. Would’ve liked the article to quote someone from Round8 directly rather than proxying the whole ’at what cost’ angle through analyst data.
MM
Micah Moyo2026-06-15
I put enough hours into Lies of P to hit every ending and track down the Ergo boss weapons, so I’m obviously locked in for whatever Round8 announces next. What genuinely concerns me isn’t the sequel itself — it’s the bit about an unknown studio pulling the loudest crowd reaction at SGF. If that studio is pulling talent or publisher attention away from the niche Round8 carved out, the pressure to chase that reaction with the next Lies of P chapter could push the game away from what made the original special. The Soulslike space rewarding ’price-conscious holiday buying’ is also a weird way to credit a game as deliberately paced and mechanically precise as Lies of P — it implies the audience is bargain-hunting rather than actively seeking this type of design. Hoping the follow-up piece actually names the mystery studio.
EG
Erik Glover2026-06-15
Wait, that unnamed studio at Summer Game Fest drew a bigger reaction than the Lies of P announcement? Which studio?
