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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, with the team behind NO LAW numbering around two dozen people. Co-founders Tor Frick and Arcade Berg both serve as creative directors on the project, and 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. Managing Director Claës af Burén 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 roughly two-dozen-person studio can build a world with the texture of a much larger production.