Neon Giant

Neon Giant AB is the Swedish video game development studio behind NO LAW. Based in Uppsala, Sweden, the studio was founded in April 2018 and operates as a small team of experienced industry veterans. Neon Giant is a subsidiary of KRAFTON, Inc., which acquired the studio in November 2022.

Founding

Neon Giant was founded by Tor Frick, Arcade Berg, Jonathan Heckley, and Erik Gloersen. The founders had previously worked on major AAA titles at larger studios, with backgrounds spanning franchises such as Bulletstorm, Far Cry 3, Gears of War, Wolfenstein, and Doom. They established Neon Giant with the intention of building dense, reactive worlds as a small, focused team.

The studio received early support from Goodbye Kansas (later renamed Amplifier Game Invest) and earned one of 37 developer grants from Epic Games in June 2018 for work on an unannounced cyberpunk project.

Games

Ownership

KRAFTON, Inc., the South Korean publisher known for PUBG and other titles, acquired Neon Giant in November 2022. KRAFTON serves as the publisher for NO LAW. Despite the acquisition, Neon Giant continues to operate as a small, focused studio in Uppsala.

Team and Creative Direction

Neon Giant remains a deliberately small studio. In August 2026 co-founder Arcade Berg put the team at 24 people, up from twelve when the studio started, while noting that the ambition of the current project is roughly ten times greater than that of the studio's debut. Berg has also described the team composition as intentional: everyone on it has previously held a lead or director position and wanted to stay hands-on, so the studio was built to keep them working directly in the engine rather than in meetings.

Job titles for the two co-founders are recorded inconsistently. First-party publisher material credits Tor Frick as creative director on the project and credits Arcade Berg as a co-founder of the studio. Independent write-ups of the August 2026 presentation, which both men delivered together, instead describe the pair as co-creative directors. This page keeps the first-party wording, and the difference is noted rather than resolved.

The studio emphasizes that every artist, designer and programmer leaves a strong imprint on the world, which it views as the reason its games carry a recognizable personality.

The studio has also stated that no generative AI is used in the production of NO LAW, and that the team builds its games the way it wants to, with its creative independence intact after the acquisition.

Approach to NO LAW

NO LAW represents a significant evolution for the studio, moving from the isometric twin-stick perspective of The Ascent to an immersive first-person open-world experience. Claës af Burén, the studio's chief executive, has described it as the next step for the studio, applying everything learned from their debut to a completely different kind of experience, one that is bigger, more reactive, and more personal.

Neon Giant describes its guiding principle for the project as density over scale. Rather than chasing the largest possible map, the studio concentrates on how much detail, reactivity, and gameplay possibility it can pack into each street, alley, and interior of Port Desire. The small team treats this focus as the reason a studio of 24 people can build a world with the texture of a much larger production.

The studio has said it takes its reference points more from comics, anime, manga, film and places the team has actually visited than from other games, and that it treats cyberpunk as science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s rather than as a forecast of the future.

Neon Giant credits its output to getting the team into a flow state where they can be fully immersed in the work, which it describes as the reason a small team can produce a large amount of content and detail in a short time.

Studio History

The studio publishes its own timeline, which places the KRAFTON acquisition two years before work on NO LAW was made public.

Stated Values

The studio sets out four values, and they line up closely with how it has described building Port Desire: a small team, high detail, and a deliberate refusal to compete on scale.

The studio is based in Uppsala and recruits on the strength of that structure, describing itself as an indie developer paying at AAA level, with creative ownership handed to individuals rather than held centrally.

Named Team Members

The studio's own games page carries a team experience block naming four members of staff alongside the franchises they previously worked on. None of the four is tied to NO LAW by the page itself, and the studio has not published a credits list for the project.

The studio's own site still does not mention NO LAW anywhere. Its games list carries only The Ascent and the Cyber Heist expansion, and the published studio timeline still ends in 2022, so the site is not a usable source on the project's progress in either direction.

Position Within KRAFTON

As of August 2026 the publisher describes itself as a network of 19 creative studios, of which Neon Giant is one. The studio has said its creative independence survived the acquisition, and that it continues to decide how its games get made.