Summer Eternal gives players 5% of studio, reveals Red Rooster RPG
Summer Eternal has given its players five percent of the studio and a formal place in how it is run.
The detail came alongside the reveal of Red Rooster, its first role-playing game. Summer Eternal was formed by former developers of Disco Elysium, the dialogue-driven detective RPG first released in 2019. Eurogamer
The five percent stake is held by the Players Non-Profit, a community organisation open to anyone who buys anything from the studio. That includes the 500-page Anthology, the volume setting out its vision. The other 95 percent is divided between full-time workers, freelancers and investors.
Summer Eternal calls the non-profit the voice of the gamers. It describes the set-up as an experimental attempt to formalise community decision-making in game development. Every player counts as a member of the board.
That five percent is enough to summon a general Assembly to discuss a topic. Revenue flowing to the non-profit can be used to organise events, support union work, or for whatever its assembly of all members decides.
Red Rooster is described by the studio as an incendiary RPG. It fuses text-heavy isometric role-playing, played from a tilted top-down view with long dialogue trees, with the world-building and player agency of an immersive sim, a first-person style built around open-ended problem solving. Eurogamer
Players take the role of Redrick Roost, a white-collar inmate made into an arson investigator. He works with an opiate-dependent mathematician to look into a string of fires linked to his brother, the city fire chief. The setting is Arta-Tantor, a tri-partite city presented as a fractalised border archipelago.
The tagline sets the tone. "Fight fires to get to the truth of your world. Start fires to get to the truth about yourself."
Inside Red's head is The Coop, a mental space populated by roosters. Each one stands for a different motivation, urge or personality. The team cites Exanima, Half-Life: Alyx, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment and Larian's Divinity engine games as inspirations.
The crew includes Argo Tuulik, writer and world-builder on Disco Elysium, plus former ZA/UM staff Dora Klindžić, Anastasia Ivanova and Michael Oswell. Aleksandar Gavrilović, secretary of the Croatian Game Development Alliance, and Lenval Brown, the narrator of Disco Elysium, are also involved.
Red Rooster drops the fixed isometric view for a three-dimensional world with a dynamic camera. It is being built in Unreal Engine, Epic Games' widely used development toolkit, to use advanced physics features. Summer Eternal says an internal playable tech demo already exists and pre-production is nearing its end.
The studio says it is aiming for a double-A budget, a mid-sized production between indie and blockbuster, similar in scale to the compact Sandfall Interactive team behind its 2025 RPG. The Anthology carries a development diary on Red Rooster, alongside interviews with economists Yanis Varoufakis and Richard Wolff, author Ted Chiang, and BioWare veterans Mark Darrah and David Gaider.
What makes this stand out is the pairing. A strange detective story on one side. A shared ownership experiment on the other.
