505 Games Funds a Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Sequel With Creator Xia Siyuan

One year after launching into a soulslike market that did not really need another soulslike, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is getting a sequel. 505 Games and its parent Digital Bros have signed a development and publishing agreement with Xia Siyuan, the original creator of Wuchang, and his new studio Indolphinity to build a brand new chapter of the IP. The deal lands about twelve months after the first game shipped to a 130,000-player Steam concurrency spike and a five-million-player all-platforms total, and roughly half a year after the Leenzee team that built the original effectively imploded. The sequel is officially in preparation, will remain based in China, and carries a 21.5 million euro development budget from Digital Bros.

What the deal actually covers

Per the official 505 Games statement and a Digital Bros press release dated July 29, 2026, Indolphinity is the operational name for Chengdu Recursive Dolphin Technology, a newly formed studio founded by Xia Siyuan. Indolphinity will lead creative development on the sequel while 505 Games provides funding and handles exclusive global publishing. The two sides confirmed development will stay rooted in China, which matters because most of the original Leenzee crew and the Wuchang IP tooling were already in that ecosystem. 505 also said the new project has officially entered its preparation phase, and that the team will fold in player feedback while protecting the original creative vision and the late-Ming Sichuan setting that defined the first game.

Digital Bros is putting 21.5 million euros behind the sequel, a number that puts the project comfortably above the budget of a typical AA soulslike and into the lower end of a mid-tier Western AAA title. That is a meaningful bet for a series whose first entry shipped with a Mixed user-review band on Steam and roughly 44,000 user reviews at the time of writing. The 505 Games tweet framing was unusually direct, calling out both the 130,000-player Steam concurrency peak and the five-million-player across-PC-and-console total, and explicitly thanking players for the feedback that the new team intends to act on.

What happened to the original team

Anyone who has tracked Wuchang since launch knows why this announcement comes with a paragraph of asterisks. Through 2025 and into early 2026, reports painted a messy picture at Leenzee: founder and creative director Xia Siyuan was reportedly let go, after which a large share of the development staff walked out in solidarity. Several outlets framed that as the studio effectively ceasing to exist as a working team. 505 Games kept the publishing role and the IP, but the human engine behind the game had, by most accounts, scattered. The sequel announcement reads, then, less like a routine greenlight and more like a soft reset: the publisher is rebuilding the series around its original creative lead inside a new legal entity, with the backing of a publicly traded parent in Milan.

Indolphinity is not technically a continuation of Leenzee, which is the kind of detail that will matter to anyone who paid attention to the studio credit in the first game. In a prepared statement, Xia Siyuan said the new team will listen closely to the real voices of players and the community and stay devoted to the original creative aspirations and cultural foundations. That is publisher-speak, but it is also the line he had to draw on day one: same IP, same director, new company, new budget, and a reputation to rebuild after a year of public speculation about whether the Wuchang team was even intact.

Community reaction is genuinely split

Reaction under the IGN post and on the broader timeline is mixed in a way that is worth naming. The optimistic camp points at the first game's launch numbers and a real critical base that argued, even in a crowded year, Wuchang had its own identity, and that putting the original creator back at the wheel of a properly funded sequel is exactly the move the IP needed. The skeptical camp points at the studio credit change, asks pointed questions about who is actually making the game, and notes that publisher enthusiasm for a sequel is not the same thing as a built development team. A few sharp voices in the replies framed it as classic publisher optimism: announce the sequel, sort the headcount later.

There is also a third group that simply wants to know if the sequel will keep the things the first game did well, which is a fair question. Wuchang's combat, its feathering and Madness systems, the Shu setting, and the boss design drew real defenders, and the sequel's first job is to convince a player base that has now had a full year to bounce off Nioh, Lies of P, and the usual FromSoft conversation that there is a reason to come back. The Indolphinity pitch of folding in feedback while keeping the original vision is going to be tested against that baseline, and 505 has put real money on the line to find out.

Where this leaves the Wuchang IP

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is still available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam, the Microsoft Store, and the Epic Games Store, and the launch pricing on Steam right now is 30 percent off, which is the kind of sale window that a publisher runs when they want a fresh audience to meet the IP before the next chapter is properly announced. There is no release date, no platform list, and no trailer for the sequel yet. There is a studio name, a creative lead, a 21.5 million euro budget, and a publisher with a global distribution arm. For a series that looked, six months ago, like it might end with the original launch window, that is a genuine reset.

The honest take from this side: a soulslike sequel led by the original creative lead, with full publisher funding, is the best possible version of this story, and it is also exactly the kind of announcement that has burned players before. Wuchang earned its five million players and its launch concurrency by being a real, distinct soulslike with its own ideas. If Indolphinity protects that and ships a real game, 505 Games will look smart for betting on Xia Siyuan twice. If the sequel is treated as an asset to be annualized, the same fans who carried the first game will be the first to call it out, and they will be right to do so.