IO Interactive, the Copenhagen-based studio best known for the Hitman franchise, announced in 2023 that it is developing Project Fantasy — an online fantasy RPG built as a new IP, marking the studio's first entry into the genre.

Details remain limited, but IO Interactive's own project page describes the title as designed "from the core" to entertain players and scale over many years — language that points squarely at a live-service architecture rather than a traditional boxed release. The studio has not specified an engine, a platform slate, or a release window.

The announcement itself is the notable data point here. IO Interactive has spent the better part of three decades with its identity anchored to Agent 47. The World of Assassination trilogy — Hitman (2016), Hitman 2 (2018), and Hitman 3 (2021) — was commercially successful and critically well-regarded, and the studio is also mid-development on Project 007, a Bond game developed under licence from Eon Productions. Adding a third active project, in an entirely new genre and with no existing IP to lean on, is a meaningful expansion of ambition and headcount.

The fantasy RPG space is not a quiet corner of the market. Live-service online RPGs carry notoriously high development and operational costs, long content pipelines, and player bases that are both loyal and quick to disengage when content cadence slips. The graveyard of well-funded entries — from WildStar to Anthem — is long enough to give any studio pause. IO Interactive has deep systems design competency, but networked RPG infrastructure and the content velocity required to sustain an online world are distinct disciplines from the polished, mission-based sandbox IO has refined over decades.

Worth flagging: the "built from the core" framing, paired with the explicit intention to "expand for many years," tracks closely with the live-service positioning studios use when they are targeting recurring revenue rather than a single premium launch. That is neither inherently good nor bad — Final Fantasy XIV's turnaround and Guild Wars 2's longevity prove the model can work — but it sets expectations for the kind of post-launch investment IO and its backers will need to sustain.

IO Interactive is partially employee-owned following a management buyout from Square Enix in 2017, a structure that gives the studio unusual autonomy for a mid-sized European developer. That independence has allowed it to pursue Project 007 without a major publisher and, apparently, to greenlight a genre pivot as ambitious as Project Fantasy. The tradeoff is that the financial runway for a long-horizon live-service title sits entirely on the studio's own balance sheet and whatever publishing or funding arrangements it has secured — details not yet disclosed.

What the studio does bring is credibility in systemic design. The Hitman games are architectural achievements in player agency: densely constructed spaces where variables interact in ways the development team did not fully anticipate. Whether that design philosophy translates to an open fantasy world — where the systemic surface area is orders of magnitude larger — is the central unanswered question. The skills overlap, but they are not identical.

No release date. No gameplay footage as of the time of writing. What exists is a studio with a strong pedigree and an explicit long-term intent, pointing itself at one of the most demanding genres in live-service development. The distance between that announcement and a shipped, populated online world is considerable — and the industry's recent history makes clear that distance has swallowed studios larger than IO Interactive.