Chris Wilson, co-founder of Grinding Gear Games and co-creator of Path of Exile, has offered a rare update on his new studio, and anyone expecting another sprawling ARPG may need to adjust their expectations. During his closing keynote at the New Zealand Game Developers Conference (NZGDC), Wilson said the game his new studio Light Pattern is making will be far more modest than his previous work.
Wilson uploaded the full talk to his YouTube channel on Sunday, retitling it "My Journey With Path of Exile." The conference itself took place in Auckland earlier this month (September 30th to October 3rd) under the theme "Shaping Our World," and Wilson thanked the New Zealand Game Developers Association for providing the recording.
A Small Team And No Publisher
Wilson founded Light Pattern last year, and the studio is still tiny. He told the audience it was "currently at thirteen people as of Monday" and based in Parnell, near Auckland's CBD. As for what the team is building, he is keeping that under wraps for a while longer.
"It'll be a few years before I'm ready to talk about what we're working on, but it's gonna be a lot smaller than what you may expect, especially given that I worked on Path of Exile before," Wilson said.
Part of the reason is that Light Pattern does not answer to anyone else. "We've got no need for any external investors or publishers, and this means we get to make whatever type of game we want, even if it's weird, as opposed to having to make whatever type of game investors and publishers want to put money into," he explained. He described the studio as building technology, doing things the slow way, and not rushing toward any deadline, adding that "It feels like hanging out in a garage with a bunch of friends and doing stuff the way that game development used to be done back in the day."
Why He Stepped Away From GGG
Wilson was Managing Director of Grinding Gear Games for 17 years, from 2006 to 2023, and he was candid about why he left. By 2023, he said, the studio had grown into a 200 person company and a subsidiary of a publicly traded multinational, which meant most of his days went to CEO work like international financial reporting and sanctions compliance audits. Tencent took a majority stake in the studio in 2018.
"There's a totally different skill set needed for being a CEO of a company of that size. I think I was decent at it, but it wasn't really my passion," Wilson said. He also recalled seeing a headline asking what Diablo 4 could do to compete with Path of Exile, and said the comparison was "incredibly flattering, but it was also a really large burden for me to carry."
He spent 2024 retired, traveling and trying to sort a quarter of a million Magic: The Gathering cards, before deciding he needed to make things again. Wilson said he had full confidence in co-founder Jonathan Rogers taking over, and he seems happy with how things have gone since. "Since I left, Path of Exile 1 and 2 have both broken records, and continue to do so, and that really pleases me," he said. He also wished the GGG team luck with ExileCon, which takes place in Auckland next month (November 7th and 8th), ahead of Path of Exile 2's full launch on December 11th.
Motherboards In Carry-On Bags And A Surprise BAFTA
Much of the talk was a trip through GGG's scrappy early days. Wilson described starting the company in his garage in West Auckland, and flying to the US for a press tour with a computer's motherboard and graphics card stuffed into his carry-on luggage to avoid paying thousands of dollars to rent a PC. He also revealed that only 22 percent of the beta codes the team handed out at PAX in 2011 were actually used, which left him bitterly disappointed at the time.
He also told the story of the 2020 BAFTA for Best Evolving Game. Up against games like Fortnite, No Man's Sky, and Apex Legends, Wilson was so sure Path of Exile would lose that he recorded a low-effort acceptance video at home during lockdown. It won.
Advice For Developers
Wilson closed with advice for New Zealand studios, and he did not sugarcoat the risks. He said that if a young, inexperienced group of friends with little money pitched him a project as big as Path of Exile today, he would tell them they were crazy, and admitted that "the only reason I am here is because of survivorship bias." Funding the game, he said, "depleted my entire life savings, Erik's entire life savings, Jonathan's entire life savings."
He also warned against chasing fads like VR and crypto gaming, and described the current funding climate as "a bloodbath out there." Even so, he believes now is a good time to start a high-quality game, since fewer of them will be coming out in a few years. "If you're making a high-quality thing right now, you stand a good chance of being able to stick your head above the crowd of slop in a few years time," he said, pointing to the wave of poorly made AI games he expects once the tools make it easy for anyone to churn something out.
Are you curious to see what kind of smaller game the co-creator of Path of Exile is working on at Light Pattern?
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