Slitherine has bought the Blood Bowl video game license from the collapsing Nacon

The Blood Bowl video game license has a new owner. Embattled French publisher Nacon has sold the license, the publishing rights, and the series back catalogue to British strategy specialist Slitherine, according to a press release picked up by TheSixthAxis and PC Gamer. Cyanide Studio, the team that has made the Blood Bowl games for years, stays on to keep developing the series, including the next entry that was announced back in March.

For anyone who plays Games Workshop's fantasy-football-with-injuries board game in video form, the short version is that the games are not going anywhere and the people who make them keep their jobs a while longer. That second part matters more than the first right now.

Why the license was up for grabs

Nacon is in serious financial trouble. The problems started upstream at parent company Bigben Interactive, which failed to make a 43 million euro bond repayment after its banks refused to refinance, and that pushed Nacon toward insolvency. In March, four Nacon-owned studios filed for insolvency through the French courts: Cyanide, Spiders (the Greedfall developer), Kylotonn, and Nacon Tech. Spiders has since been shut down.

Cyanide is still a subsidiary of Nacon, and it is still working through that insolvency process, which in France lets a company try to secure fresh investment while it keeps operating. Selling the Blood Bowl rights to Slitherine does not undo any of that, but as TheSixthAxis put it, the deal "will at least help to pay some of the wages." That is the honest frame here. This is a struggling studio getting a bit of runway, not a triumphant relaunch.

What Slitherine is actually getting, and what it plans to do

Slitherine is a natural home for Blood Bowl. It builds and publishes strategy and wargames, a lot of them under Games Workshop licenses, so the turn-based dice-and-tactics core of Blood Bowl fits what the company already does.

The next game, Warhammer Blood Bowl, is being rebuilt with the latest tabletop rules from Games Workshop, using Blood Bowl 3 as its foundation. The announced additions are an updated roster, new competitions, tutorials, and a new World Championship. There is also a new Rumble mode with condensed rules: seven-player teams, 30-minute matches, and a smaller pitch, aimed at faster games than the full ruleset allows.

Crucially, Cyanide is the one building it. Slitherine is not buying the studio. It is taking on the license and keeping Cyanide as the developer.

Marco Minoli, Slitherine's Director of Publishing, said: "Blood Bowl is one of the most iconic and distinctive strategy franchises in videogames, and we're genuinely honoured to help shape its future alongside Cyanide and Warhammer." He added that the company has "enormous respect for what Cyanide has built over the years."

The new game gets its proper showing at Slitherine Next, the publisher's showcase, streaming on July 22 at 5:00 PM BST.

The reason a change in hands reads as good news

Blood Bowl 3 is the recent history hanging over all of this. It launched in 2023 and did not land well. It sits at "Mixed" on Steam, with complaints about bugs and an always-online requirement that a turn-based game did not need. That is a game with real problems, which is a different thing from a broken game. Blood Bowl 2, from 2015, is still the one long-time players point to as the good one, even though it has its own unresolved Steam gripes.

So the bar Slitherine and Cyanide have to clear is not high in terms of goodwill, and it is fairly clear in terms of what went wrong last time. A rebuild on current Games Workshop rules, without the always-online baggage, is the obvious fix. Whether the new game delivers that is a question for July 22 and beyond. For now the license is in the hands of a publisher that knows this genre, the developer keeps working, and a series that looked stranded when its publisher started falling apart has somewhere to go.