The Studio That Kept the Name Wasn't the One That Stayed

On August 25, 2026, at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, 4A Games debuted the gameplay trailer for Metro 2039 and walked away with the show’s Best Visuals award. The pitch behind it is specific: a Ukrainian studio, a team that lived through the invasion, a story rewritten from scratch after the war made the original draft feel obscene. 4A Games has said as much directly: the story got torn up and rebuilt around what its own people had just lived through.⊕

Dmitry Glukhovsky, the novelist whose books started the Metro franchise, still works with the studio remotely. He’s an outspoken critic of the invasion and cannot go home.⊕ Every part of that framing is true. Look at the corporate structure behind the trailer and it gets more complicated.

Two Companies, One Origin

4A Games was founded in Kyiv in 2006 by three developers who’d just left GSC Game World, the studio behind S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In 2014, as Russia annexed Crimea and fighting broke out in the Donbas, two of those founders, Andrew Prokhorov and Oles Shyshkovtsov, opened a second office in Sliema, Malta. The Kyiv studio kept running. Both offices shared the 4A Games name and finished Metro Exodus together in 2019.

That arrangement held until money got involved. In 2020, Embracer Group acquired the Malta studio through its Saber Interactive subsidiary for roughly $36 million.⊕ The Kyiv studio, legally a separate company by then, wasn’t part of the deal. It took its own outside investment and started building an original IP, a sci-fi shooter called La Quimera, co-written with filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. In 2024, Embracer sold Saber to a new holding company run by Saber’s own co-founder. 4A Games Malta wasn’t included in that sale either. It stayed with Embracer, a direct subsidiary, still holding the Metro publishing rights through Embracer’s Plaion arm.

By February 2025, the original Kyiv entity needed a new name of its own. It rebranded as Reburn under CEO Dmytro Lymar, a twenty-year industry veteran, and handed the 4A Games trademark to the Malta side rather than contest it.⊕ Neither of the studio’s original founders leads Reburn. Both are still on the Malta side, making Metro.

The studio that physically never left Ukraine, the one whose legal lineage traces straight back to the 2006 founding without a Malta detour, is Reburn. It doesn’t make Metro anymore, having given up that right in the same settlement that renamed it.

Whoever Kept the Paperwork

None of this makes 4A Games Malta’s wartime narrative false. Its Kyiv office is real, its staff’s experience is real, and Glukhovsky’s exile is real. But the studio telling that story to millions of people at Gamescom is the corporate descendant of the two founders who relocated out of Ukraine the same year the war started, run through a Swedish holding company that has bought, sold and reshuffled it twice since. The studio that stayed rooted in the original Kyiv entity through the actual invasion is the one that walked away with a new name and no Metro credit.

Nobody voted on which company was more Ukrainian. Nobody at Embracer sat down and asked which studio had suffered more or stayed closer to the source. A trademark either transfers or it doesn’t. In February 2025, one side transferred it. That decision now does all the identity work in public: it’s why every Gamescom headline says “4A Games” is the studio behind Metro’s wartime authenticity, and why Reburn has to spend its own press cycle explaining who it used to be.

Teams split for reasons that have nothing to do with brand: a founder leaves to build something new, a division gets sold off, an acquihire swallows half a company and leaves the other half to fend for itself. In every one of those situations, somebody has to answer the question 4A Games and Reburn answered by lawyer: which half gets to say “we are the company you already trust,” and which half starts over.

The instinct is to assume that answer tracks the people, the culture, the ones who stayed through the hard years. It doesn’t. It tracks whoever’s name is on the trademark filing, the domain registration, the app store listing, the customer contract. A PM watching a team fragment, whether it’s an internal reorg, a spinout or an acquisition, should check the paperwork before believing the marketing.

Metro 2039 ships in February 2027, from a studio in Malta with a Kyiv office a few years younger than the war it depicts. Reburn ships La Quimera from the company that’s actually been in Kyiv the whole time, under a name nobody outside the industry will recognize as the studio that helped build S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro in the first place.