Snapshot Games

Snapshot Games is a Bulgarian video game developer headquartered in Sofia.^[2][3] Snapshot Games was founded in 2013 by Julian Gollop and David Kaye.^[2][4] Gollop is recognized for creating the X-COM video game franchise in the 1990s with X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Apocalypse.^{[5][2][6][7][8][9]} Gollop also is the CEO of Snapshot Games.^[9] In addition to Gollop, the company includes about eight developers who are industry veterans with years of previous experience working for Ubisoft Sofia, Crytek Black Sea, and other Bulgaria studios.^[2]

On November 12, 2013, Snapshot Games was founded as a privately held corporation in the state of California of the United States.^[4] However, it is based in Bulgaria where its CEO, Julian Gollop, lives and where video game development costs are about one-third of what they would be for a similar studio in the United States.^[2][3][9]

In April 2014, Snapshot Games launched a Kickstarter to crowdfund the development of its first video game, Chaos Reborn.^[10] The effort was successful, generating over $210,000.^[10] The game was made available through the Early Access program of Steam on December 9, 2014 before it was released officially on October 26, 2015.^[11] The game received a score of 86/100 on review aggregation website Metacritic.^[12] PC Gamer awarded it a score of 87%, saying "A true wizard’s wheeze, and a fine return for one of gaming’s oldest tactical classics."^[13] The game also was nominated for a Golden Joystick Award in the 2015 Best Indie Game category but lost to Kerbal Space Program.^[14][15]

Julian Gollop teased the development of a new video game, Phoenix Point, on Twitter on March 18, 2016.^[16][17] For the next year, Snapshot Games worked on designing and producing the game.^[18] After investing $450,000 into this first year of development, the company launched a Fig crowdfunding campaign in April 2017 to obtain the $500,000 they budgeted to complete the game.^[3][19] The future of Snapshot relied on the success of the campaign.^[18] "There is no Plan B," Gollop said to the press at the time.^[18] The campaign was successful, raising more than $765,000 from over 10,300 different contributors.^[19] Snapshot Games released Phoenix Point in 2019.^[20][21]

In November 2020, Embracer Group announced that it acquired the company through Saber Interactive.^[22] In March 2024, Embracer sold Saber and many of its studios to Beacon Interactive. However, Snapshot was not included in the deal and remains under Embracer.^[23]

In February 2025, the studio announced its next project, Chip ‘n Clawz vs. The Brainioids. Published by Arc Games, also a subsidiary of Embracer, it was the first to not be self-published by Snapshot Games.^[24] The game was released to positive reviews in August 2025. ^[25][26]

In March of the same year, publisher Arc Games announced a video game adaptation of the board game Frosthaven, developed by Snapshot.^[27] The game entered early access four months later, in July.^[28]

• Official website