Bulgarian video game developer
Snapshot Games is a Bulgarian video game developer headquartered in Sofia.[2][3] Snapshot Games was founded in 2013 by Julian Gollop and David Kaye.[2][4] Gollop is recognized for creating the X-COM video game franchise in the 1990s with X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Apocalypse.[5][2][6][7][8][9] Gollop also is the CEO of Snapshot Games.[9] In addition to Gollop, the company includes about eight developers who are industry veterans with years of previous experience working for Ubisoft Sofia, Crytek Black Sea, and other Bulgaria studios.[2]
History
On November 12, 2013, Snapshot Games was founded as a privately held corporation in the state of California of the United States.[4] However, it is based in Bulgaria where its CEO, Julian Gollop, lives and where video game development costs are about one-third of what they would be for a similar studio in the United States.[2][3][9]
In April 2014, Snapshot Games launched a Kickstarter to crowdfund the development of its first video game, Chaos Reborn.[10] The effort was successful, generating over $210,000.[10] The game was made available through the Early Access program of Steam on December 9, 2014 before it was released officially on October 26, 2015.[11] The game received a score of 86/100 on review aggregation website Metacritic.[12] PC Gamer awarded it a score of 87%, saying "A true wizard’s wheeze, and a fine return for one of gaming’s oldest tactical classics."[13] The game also was nominated for a Golden Joystick Award in the 2015 Best Indie Game category but lost to Kerbal Space Program.[14][15]
Julian Gollop teased the development of a new video game, Phoenix Point, on Twitter on March 18, 2016.[16][17] For the next year, Snapshot Games worked on designing and producing the game.[18] After investing $450,000 into this first year of development, the company launched a Fig crowdfunding campaign in April 2017 to obtain the $500,000 they budgeted to complete the game.[3][19] The future of Snapshot relied on the success of the campaign.[18] "There is no Plan B," Gollop said to the press at the time.[18] The campaign was successful, raising more than $765,000 from over 10,300 different contributors.[19] Snapshot Games has committed to release Phoenix Point in 2019.[20][21]
In November 2020, Embracer Group announced that they acquired the company through Saber Interactive, which will be the parent company.[22]
