Former Call of Duty frontman launches new studio with a 'Stop Killing Games'-style mission statement: If the game bombs, it goes open source

Former Call of Duty strategist Robert Bowlling, whose ill-fated venture with Midnight Society came to an end in 2025, is taking another shot at the game business. In a message posted to LinkedIn, Bowling said he's co-founded a new studio with "a killer team," and while nothing was said about what it's currently working on, the studio is called //18.bravo and that sure sounds like something to me.

The something in question, in case I'm being too cryptic here, is an utterance by someone in the Captain Price mold as he prepares to unleash havoc upon the foes of freedom and democracy—which in turn leads me to assume a shooter is on the way, likely of the modern military sort.

Bowling's CV would suggest the same: He's been in the game industry for a long time and held numerous positions at various studios, but is best known for his years at Infinity Ward, where he became the community face of the Modern Warfare games as "fourzerotwo" until his departure in 2012.

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Today's announcement, though, is all about the studio itself: Bowling said the new outfit "ties leadership compensation to employee success," has a royalty program for employees, and will share profits with "external talents" like voice actors and contractors.

He also said the new studio is "not supporting live service" with its debut project, and maybe even more notably given the growing pushback against game shutdowns, said it is being built with a focus on enabling "forever play": Dedicated servers will be supported when the game goes live, but it will also incorporate "optimized P2P architecture that allows the community to play together even if the company moves on."

Bowling also committed to open-sourcing code, assets, "and everything required to extend the game (except 3rd party integrations and licensed music)" if the new studio goes under. "Most importantly," he wrote, "we will be releasing all the legal paperwork and processes that make this possible publicly so the model can be replicated easily and at low cost to those who decide to mimic the model."

That's easy to say and perhaps a bit trickier to do—follow-through is the real tale of the tape—but even so, Bowling's declaration is notable in the current industry environment. Online gaming is tremendously popular, but games that are dependent on external servers for functionality are also very delicate: When a company shuts down—or merely decides that it's not making enough money—they're effectively lost, with no recourse for players.

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Consumer movements like Stop Killing Games have begun to push back on that behaviour, although with limited effectiveness thus far. So while committing to building a game that won't immediately die if it fails to achieve arbitrary revenue numbers shouldn't be a big deal, right now it kind of is.