“I don’t want to just do Private Division 2.0”: Blake Rochkind on Lyrical Games

Earlier this year, head of Lyrical Games Blake Rochkind left publisher Private Division and his position as head of business development. “It was just a natural time for me to leave,” Rochkind tells GamesIndustry.biz.

Following layoffs at Private Division in May 2024 – and the closure of Roll7 and Intercept Games – parent company Take-Two Interactive confirmed in November that it had sold the publisher for an undisclosed sum to an undisclosed buyer.

When asked what Take-Two ‘s company line was regarding the sale, he told us he didn’t need it. “I had a front row seat,” says Rochkind. “I think everyone knew the score there.”

In January 2025, Bloomberg reported the buyer was Haveli Investments, which was bringing in former Annapurna Interactive staff to manage Private Division’s portfolio. The publisher was later renamed to Fictions, and more Private Division staff were laid off as a result of the acquisition.

Unable to go into specifics about when he felt the tides change at Private Division, Rochkind simply says the publisher was impacted by the “same shift” that affected others in the industry, with macroeconomic events making Take-Two Interactive “view the business differently.”

“From the time Private Division was an idea within Take-Two to when Private Division was sold, Take-Two became a majorly different company,” explains Rochkind. “I think, at the end of the day, it became very hard for a company like Private Division to make an impact to something like Take-Two.”

“I think the vibe was, ‘you’re either all in or you’re all out on the new thing’. And I ultimately chose the latter.”

Blake Rochkind, head of Lyrical Games

A month after Fictions took over, Rochkind quietly left the publisher after almost five years.

“I had guided Private Division through some pretty choppy waters at Take-Two , frankly, and then helped navigate that entire private equity thing,” he tells us.

“It was a lot. It also happened to coincide with my first year as a father, and then, it was just sort of a natural thing. I think the vibe was, ‘you’re either all in or you’re all out on the new thing’. And I ultimately chose the latter.”

A new venture

In March 2025, just a month after leaving Private Division, Rochkind and Lyrical Media CEO and founder, Alexander Black, officially started Lyrical Games, a new, privately funded independent games publisher.

The pair met during COVID-19, when Black was starting his independent production company (now Lyrical Games’ parent company), Lyrical Media. At the time, things were “pretty good” at Private Division, says Rochkind, but “when things got a little rockier, that’s when he and I started talking about what this actually could be.”

On the first day of GDC 2025 in March, Lyrical Games began business.

In a tumultuous gaming landscape, new, indie-focused publishers are welcome (and rare). Rochkind agrees it’s hard to start a new publisher right now, but believes the “super cycle” the industry has been in has ended, and a new cycle is beginning, making it a “better time to start something than it was two or three years ago.”

That logic is a large part of Lyrical Games’ thesis.

“I think the conversations that we’ve been having with developers so far have borne that out,” he explains. “People are very excited that there’s a new entrant, frankly, a new entrant that is funding things.

“People are very excited that there’s a new entrant, frankly, a new entrant that is funding things.”

Blake Rochkind, head of Lyrical Games

“I thought I knew how bad it was out there, until I announced to my network that, ‘hey, we are open for business, we are funding things, we are a new publisher’. The number of people who are like, ‘Oh my god, you guys are like an oasis in the desert’ is really gratifying and obviously scary, because, of course, we can only do so much. We’re not going to sign every game, and we have to choose wisely.”

Another pillar of Lyrical Games’ thesis is its focus on high-tier (or Triple-I) indie games. Rochkind refutes that the gaming industry currently has a “lost middle,” a term typically used to describe games that are more polished than your average indie game, but which manage to be profitable without the budget of a AAA budget.

“I think maybe there was a brief moment in time when that was true,” Rochkind explains. “I just think it depends on what you think the lost middle is.

“I think when people talked about the lost middle, what they meant was $50 million games that could compete with the $100 million games. But what I actually think we’re seeing, for a variety of reasons, is diminishing returns on tech.”

“There’s only so many pixels you can push on a 16 by nine screen,” Rochkind continues. “When I was coming up, it was all about the verisimilitude of graphics, how realistic can this game be. And that’s not the world we live in now.”

Rochkind points to Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a prime example of the kind of game the publisher is targeting. “That’s a game that I happen to know the budget of,” Rochkind says. “I saw the pitch at Private Division, and I tried to pursue it there.”

Neither Sandfall Interactive nor publisher Kepler Interactive has ever publicly confirmed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s budget. However, speaking to GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, Kepler Interactive portfolio director Matthew Handrahan said he was “sure Mirror’s Edge and Vanquish cost more.”

“If we have one of those in our life as a label, that would be a dream,” Rochkind continues. “It shows what’s possible from a small team, smaller budget. And if you actually compare it side by side to something like Final Fantasy, it doesn’t hold up graphically, but it’s visually good enough that the other elements of it, that are incredible, can shine through.”

A common thread

As such, Lyrical Games wants to primarily back “3D indies,” but that isn’t necessarily a hard-and-fast rule. More specifically, Rochkind explains, Lyrical Games is targeting “games that are reaching above and gesture towards being triple A but are not AAA.”

Rochkind doesn’t want to share the exact production budget range the publisher has in mind, as that figure is a “moving target,” but confirms that the “vast majority” of Lyrical Games’ titles will be multi-million dollar projects that retail for between $30 and $60.

The publisher has already signed three titles, including the next game from Homeworld 3 developer, Blackbird Interactive.

While Rochkind currently remains tight-lipped about the other two, he reveals that the publisher’s first game will be announced at this year’s Gamescom, with another announcement coming “sometime this fall.”

“I can’t speak specifically [about the other two studios], but there are a few common threads I see between all three companies,” he says. “One, they’ve all shipped titles before as a studio, not a prerequisite, but I would say it’s something that we look for when we talk to developers.

“And I say shipped together because that’s an important distinction. There have been many, many teams that have started from AAA veterans starting a new studio, and it’s just tough.”

The other main threads are that each of the studios is making, what Rochkind calls, “very high quality” indie games, and that they have a “holistic” vision for their game, which he describes as “somebody who wants to have a seat at the table” for conversations on everything from branding and pricing.

Rochkind admits that these three studios, and many others for that matter, could self-publish their games, but believes his seasoned team’s expertise (not to mention the publisher’s funding) will help its developers “tremendously.”

A lean, mean team

Currently, Lyrical Games is a core team of six (including Rochkind), consisting of veterans from Private Division, Devolver Digital, Humble Games, and Microsoft.

While the publisher has confirmed that Roger Kurtz, former head of production at Private Division is on board, Rochkind won’t reveal who else is on the team.

While the plan is to grow the team, the aim is not to “build a behemoth publisher.”

“We want to build a team that is lean, mean, but really, really experienced, really strong,” Rochkind explains.

“I never want to have a feeling of needing to feed the beast where it’s like, ‘Oh, I have all these people working for me, what are we doing in Q4 2028?” That’s something I very much want to avoid, because inevitably great opportunities come your way, and I want to make sure that we are available, both bandwidth-wise and financially, to capitalize when an amazing game comes our way.”

“I never want to have a feeling of needing to feed the beast”

Blake Rochkind, head of Lyrical Games

Rochkind believes the team will stay “lean,” and while he doesn’t want to confirm any hard numbers, he predicts Lyrical Games will “always be in the low double digit of staff.”

Lyrical Games sounds like it’s financially lean, too, with Rochkind stating that the publisher has “significant backing” behind it.

“I think we can kind of afford to do anything if it makes sense,” Rochkind says when asked if there’s a hard cap on its publishing budget. “If it makes business sense, I think we can do it, and we can make the case to our backers, and they will back us. That’s my sense so far.”

Rochkind goes on to explain that the team’s priority is to support its developer partners, while “staying relatively small.”

“I don’t have a number in mind. I do not want to ever have a quota,” he continues. “It’s more important to have quality over quantity.

“If there’s a year where we’re only putting out one game, two games, because that’s all we really believed in, I think that’s totally fine. And I want to make sure that the business is sized so that that is totally fine. I never want to be launching games weeks apart, if we can avoid it. I can just tell you that we’re not trying to be a volume play. That’s not the goal here.”

Not Private Division 2.0

Rochkind wants to make it clear: he has “no hard feelings” for Take-Two, or about its sale. “It’s just business,” he stresses, but after leaving the publisher, he “didn’t want to just do Private Division 2.0.”

“That would be the easiest thing for me to do, to hire a bunch of people I worked with before,” he says. “I love Private Division, learned a lot from Private Division, and am not running away from Private Division either, but certainly want to draw from other people’s experience.”

“This is not about building a billion-dollar empire”

Blake Rochkind, Lyrical Games

In order to differentiate itself from other publishers, Lyrical Games has one simple aim: “To be the most collaborative and transparent publisher in the business.”

“This is not about building a billion-dollar empire,” Rochkind explains. “Frankly, we have the luxury with our backers to not need to do that, and we’re not trying to go public, or any of that stuff.

“We’re trying to back that combination of amazing, artful games that are still sort of commercially viable and can reach millions of players.”