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Cyberwave
August 18, 2026 at 03:10 AM
Removed studio-history tags that name entities outside this game's scope
Cyberwave is the independent game development studio that created Solarpunk. It is a small German indie studio, publicly described as a roughly two-person core team, and Solarpunk is published by rokaplay. The game was built over roughly four years of development.
Solarpunk was developed by Cyberwave's small core team, with funding helped along by a successful Kickstarter campaign. The studio focused on the PC build and on the game's peaceful, no-combat survival design across floating islands.
Shipping Solarpunk on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on June 8, 2026 required more engineering capacity than the small team could provide alone. The publisher partnered with Mi'pu'mi Games, a Vienna-based porting studio, to handle the three console versions. The PC version remains Cyberwave's direct responsibility.
Detail | Information |
|---|---|
Studio name | Cyberwave |
Type | Small independent studio (roughly two-person core team) |
Country | Germany |
Publisher | |
Console porter | |
Game | |
Engine | Unreal Engine 5 |
For a two-person studio, Cyberwave put Solarpunk in front of an unusually large number of audiences during development. The showcase circuit is also where several of the game's biggest announcements landed, including the release date and the Xbox Game Pass deal.
Event | When | What happened |
|---|---|---|
OTK Games Expo | June 2024 | Solarpunk took two awards at the showcase, a community-voted trailer prize worth $10,000 and a second award for its art style. The studio also received a custom Solarpunk-themed PC. The developers said the show was watched by hundreds of thousands of people across the main channel and co-streams. |
gamescom | August 2024 | Cyberwave gave press and content creators a behind-closed-doors presentation, the first time the game had been shown that way, and afterwards published the same material publicly as a gameplay showing alongside an alpha progress report. |
Co-op reveal showcase | February 2026 | The co-op gameplay reveal trailer premiered during an online showcase, the studio's first new trailer in roughly a year and a half and the first built around multiplayer. |
The Triple-i Initiative | April 2026 | The June 8, 2026 release date was announced during the showcase, along with the four launch platforms. A longer post-show deep dive with the studio ran alongside it. |
Cozy Game Awards | May 2026 | The Xbox Game Pass day-one deal was revealed here, shortly before launch. |
The Xbox deal had an unusual origin. In mid-2024 the studio publicly pitched Xbox on social media asking for the game to be considered for Game Pass, and the post spread widely at the time. The Game Pass announcement followed nearly two years later.
By the spring before launch, Solarpunk had passed nearly 1.2 million Steam wishlists, an unusually strong figure for a cozy survival game from a small studio. The team has pointed to that number as evidence that the cozy, no-combat survival design found an audience well before the June 8, 2026 launch.
The studio's public framing across Kickstarter campaign updates and developer posts has stayed consistent: a small, focused team rather than a rapidly scaling studio. That approach made the console port partnership with the Vienna-based porting studio a structural choice rather than a late addition, since the multi-platform launch required engineering capacity beyond what the core team handles directly.
