David Polfeldt's Bespoke Pixel studio "interested in creating a masterpiece"

As the former Managing Director of Massive Entertainment and a key figure behind titles like The Division, Star Wars Outlaws, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and the Snowdrop engine, David Polfeldt is a veteran of the triple-A gaming industry. However, the operation of his former studio in Malmö became a tad too Massive -pun intended- for his personal preference. In March 2022, Polfeldt departed from the company and its owner, Ubisoft, with no initial intention of reprising a similar role.

Fast forward to a recent encounter in Málaga at Gamelab Nexus, where Gamereactor caught up with Polfeldt, and it's a whole different story. Not only has the Swedish developer established a new studio in Barcelona -Bespoke Pixel, founded in February 2024 and led by Polfeldt himself- but they are now ten weeks into production of their very first game, which, despite the small team size, aims to be "world-class, triple-A".

"Well, it can be a long story, but the shorter story is that I promised myself never to run a studio again", Polfeldt confesses in the full video interview above. "It's it's a lot of responsibility, and a lot of pressure, and I was really happy with what I had done at Massive, but I also felt like 'this is probably my max and I don't have an idea [of] what I want to do next'. And for two years, I didn't run a studio. But then this opportunity showed up at the horizon and it looked more and more interesting. And I decided that if I'm gonna do it, it needs to be an adventure also. Not just a job. So adventure means not in Malmö, because I did 17 years of video games industry in Malmö and I loved it, but it's not an adventure for me anymore. And then we started looking at places with better climate and in the end we analysed around 10 cities including Barcelona, but to be honest Barcelona came up on top in almost every category".

Bespoke Pixel already into AAA production with a small world-class team in Barcelona

Weather, but above all the pool of world-class talent available for hiring, with an apparent lack of highly ambitious studios in place, sealed the deal. Polfeldt "intentionally put all of the leadership and all of the decision-making in the studio in Barcelona", he tells us, "so there's no external force that you're used to, like publishers or stakeholders or whomever".

Beyond autonomy and independence, the idea is to remain compact -even a bit elitist when it comes to hiring- while simultaneously pursuing top-quality game development. Bespoke Pixel consists of just nine employees for now, with a cap of twenty people and a potential sweet spot around sixteen. "We might end up being 40, you know", he concedes, "but no interest in a thousand". So what are they working on?

"I'm going to put my head in the kind of gear guillotine of shame", Polfeldt jokes, "and at the risk of making an incredible fool of myself, I am interested right now in creating a masterpiece. Because I've done a lot of stuff in video games for 30 years and most of it I've done well enough to feel satisfied. But this is the chance to really create the masterpiece and get many many things right from the start, and we're attracting people who are in the same mindset right now, where they feel 'I think I'm pretty good, but I want to go like really, really to the extreme level of my own craft'. So it's a little bit of an elite".

For Bespoke Pixel to deliver AAA finish and production values with a team of under 50 it's not a matter of relying on AI "or that kind of mumbo-jumbo", it's all about efficiency, team connection, synergies, and shared vision, as the studio head explains in the full interview.

"Blurry vision costs a lot of time, a lot of waste, a lot of energy. So we're incredibly sharp on the vision - The team already knows what we're doing. We know how we want to do it"

Play the full video for more on Bespoke Pixel's very selective recruitment process (only 4% of applicants are hired), as well as Polfeldt's thoughts on Massive and Ubisoft, triple-A versus double-A development, working on-site versus remotely, and even insights on Star Wars, Avatar, and The Division.