Lazy Bear Games

Lazy Bear Games is the independent studio developing Graveyard Keeper 2. The team has worked together on small management and simulation projects for more than a decade and is best known for the 2018 original Graveyard Keeper, the title the sequel directly continues. For a wider tour of how the studio's work fits into the broader game, see the overview. Lazy Bear is the developer credit on every public Graveyard Keeper 2 announcement; tinyBuild is the publisher and a long-time partner.

Studio Profile

The studio is a small independent shop with deep roots in management and life-simulation games. The table below summarises the basic facts that have been confirmed in public.

Notable Games

Lazy Bear's released catalog leans toward management and life-sim hybrids with strong art direction and a streak of dark or wry humor. The titles below are the studio's full publicly released roster, with Graveyard Keeper 2 listed as the upcoming entry.

Graveyard Keeper 2 also leans heavily on production automation, framed around the same dark medieval setting that defined the studio's earlier work.

Studio History

The team first formed in 2010 in St. Petersburg, Russia, under the name GameJam Studio, founded by Nikita Kulaga and Sviatoslav Cherkasov. The early years were spent on small experimental projects and game jam-style work, which is reflected in the original studio name.

In April 2015 the studio rebranded to Lazy Bear Games, the name it has used ever since. Punch Club followed in 2016 and gave the studio its first major commercial release, with Graveyard Keeper arriving two years later as a much larger and longer-tailed title. The studio later relocated, and its headquarters is now based in Vilnius, Lithuania. The team has remained relatively small across that history and continues to work in the management and simulation space rather than expanding into new genres.

Graveyard Keeper Lineage

Graveyard Keeper, released in 2018, is by some distance the studio's biggest commercial hit. Aggregate estimates of lifetime Steam sales place the original somewhere between roughly 800,000 and 2 million copies, a wide range that reflects how cautious public estimates of indie sales have to be. Either way, it sits well above anything else in the studio's back catalog and is the project that gave Lazy Bear a stable audience for follow-up work.

The original was supported with four expansions released between 2019 and 2021: Breaking Dead, Stranger Sins, Game of Crone, and Better Save Soul. Each one layered new questlines and systems onto the base sim, keeping the game in active development for several years after launch.

Graveyard Keeper 2 is the direct sequel to that original. It carries forward the cemetery-management foundation and the studio's signature dark comedy, then expands the scope by adding a kingdom-scale zombie apocalypse, army-style combat, and town restoration around the graveyard. The DLC content from the first game is not assumed to carry over.

Partnerships

Lazy Bear's most consistent external relationship is with tinyBuild, the publisher behind Punch Club, Graveyard Keeper, and Graveyard Keeper 2. The two have collaborated repeatedly across nearly a decade, and the publisher's marketing and platform footprint is a meaningful part of why these titles reach a broad audience.

The studio has also worked with Uroboros Games on smaller projects in its catalog, and partnered with Riot Forge to develop Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story in 2024. Bandle Tale is the only entry in the studio's roster tied to an outside intellectual property and sits slightly outside its usual self-originated approach.

Unconfirmed Details

Several aspects of Lazy Bear's work on Graveyard Keeper 2 remain unconfirmed and should not be treated as known. This article will be updated as more information is released.

• The exact size of the team currently working on Graveyard Keeper 2

• When development on the sequel formally began

• Which engine and toolchain the sequel uses

• Total development time spent on Graveyard Keeper 2 from prototype to release

• Whether any additional projects are in development alongside the sequel

• Whether post-launch expansions are planned for the sequel in the same pattern as the original