How ActFirst Games went from a Thunderful exit to a new RPG

In November 2021 Thunderful Group bought Early Morning Studio for SEK 80 million, made up of SEK 45 million in cash and SEK 35 million in shares. The studio had seventeen people and a track record in mobile RPGs, including Vampire's Fall: Origins, which passed ten million players.

One of its two founders, Kristian Andersson, could have stopped there. In 2024 he started ActFirst Games in Stockholm instead.

The first game

Obsidian Knight is an idle auto-battler with roguelike runs underneath it.

You play a knight investigating the disappearance of a king, in a world run by seven rulers whose motives are unclear. Combat plays itself while you build the character, and the depth sits in how skills combine. Players spend their time hunting for synergies that turn a run from survivable into unstoppable.

It is an old-school design, and it works because the person who made it has shipped RPGs before and knows what the audience wants from one.

The game is free to play on iOS and Android, with a Discord community that has grown steadily since launch.

Why the second studio is different

A founder starting again after an exit is not starting from zero.

Andersson has already learned what a mobile RPG costs to run, which mistakes drain a year, and how a small team ships without a publisher standing over it. He also has the thing most first-time founders lack, which is the ability to wait. A studio that has to raise money at month six makes different decisions from one that does not.

What has not changed is the cost of operating in Sweden.

Why we are writing this

We should say what we do before we go any further.

CyberScope is an incentives consultancy in Türkiye. We help software companies and game studios claim cash back from a Turkish government programme. So when we read about a studio like ActFirst, we look at the cost side of the business, because that is the side the programme pays for.

Under Decision No. 10962, Türkiye refunds a percentage of three costs every mobile game carries: the commission Apple and Google take, the money spent buying players, and the servers. The refund is cash into the company's bank account, paid against invoices already settled, and it does not depend on the company making a profit.

Sweden refunds none of it.

The assumptions

ActFirst has not shared any financial information with us, and none of what follows comes from them.

The figures below are ours. They describe a studio with one live game and a growing player base, using the cost ratios a mobile RPG of that shape normally runs at. If the real numbers are half of these, halve the results.

Those three lines cost $1.11M a year as things stand. From a Turkish company the store commission comes back at 50 percent, advertising at 70 percent when it targets a country on the Ministry's list, and hosting at 50 percent. The same spending nets out at $435k.

The part that matters at this size

Nothing above is capped.

The standard programme limits support to 20 million lira a year on store commissions, 50 million on advertising and 5 million on hosting. Those ceilings are set high enough that a studio at ActFirst's stage never touches them. Every line comes back at the full rate.

That is worth saying plainly, because the programme gets discussed as though it were built for large exporters. The caps bite on companies spending tens of millions a year. A studio spending one million gets the whole percentage, and for a self-funded studio that money arrives at the stage when it changes what you can attempt next.

Figures use 47.7 lira to the dollar. Caps are revalued upward every year, so they grow with inflation.

What it would actually take

None of this happens by filing a form.

It needs a Turkish operating company doing real work in Türkiye: staff, a registered address, books, and invoices in the company's name. That is a structural decision about where part of the business sits, and it is a longer conversation than a blog post.

Ownership is not a factor. A company owned entirely by Swedish shareholders claims on exactly the same terms as a Turkish one. The programme exists to grow Türkiye's service exports and is indifferent to who owns the exporter.

We have written about what a Turkish company actually costs to run and what claiming actually costs.

To the team at ActFirst

You have done the hard part twice: built a studio, sold it, and started again with your own money on the line. The costs of running Obsidian Knight are the costs Türkiye was built to refund, and at your size none of them are capped.

We would like to run the model on your real numbers instead of our guesses. It takes about 20 minutes, we will show you the working, and you will get a figure you can take to your co-founder. Book a call and we will put it together.