Lies of P Studio Round 8 Rebrands to NOUGH, Hypes a Sequel With a 16-Minute Documentary

The Korean studio that broke out with the Bloodborne-coded soulslike Lies of P has quietly rebranded itself. Round 8 Studio, a subsidiary of publisher NEOWIZ, is now NOUGH Studio, a name it describes as a portmanteau of Not Enough and the operating banner under which the team plans to ship the in-production Lies of P sequel. The reveal came packaged with a 16-minute Games by Gamers documentary on the studio's YouTube channel, and it lands at an awkward moment for fans who were already bracing for the follow-up to one of the more surprising soulslike hits of the last few years.

NOUGH is being framed as a continuity play, not a pivot. The studio's motto, Games by Gamers, carries over from the Round 8 era, and the documentary spends most of its runtime walking through how the team playtested both Lies of P and last year's Lies of P: Overture expansion. The pitch is simple: the same people who built Krat are now NOUGH, and they are using the same internal loops of company-wide playtests, milestone livestreams, and survey-driven iteration that produced the original game's difficulty modes and shaped the Overture expansion's story cuts.

What the documentary actually shows

The film is split between retrospective material on Lies of P and forward-looking sizzle for the sequel, which still does not have a name. Combat director Lee Jeonghyeon uses his segment to plant a flag: From the very start, my goal has been to create the world's greatest action game. And we're getting there, one step at a time. Overall director Choi Jiwon closes the video with a direct appeal to fans, asking them to trust the process: We're giving everything we have to make it the best it can be. So please wait just a little bit longer. We won't let you down. I promise.

That kind of talk is cheap from a smaller studio with no delivery date, but NOUGH can at least point to Overture as evidence. The prequel expansion was a critical hit, and PC Gamer's Harvey Randall has already staked out his willingness to back the sequel sight unseen on the strength of that DLC. The bigger story is the rebrand itself: rather than quietly slide the Round 8 name out the back door, NOUGH is leaning into a fresh identity right as the team's most important project is in full production. That is either confidence or pressure, and a 16-minute documentary does not fully resolve which.

How the studio tests its own games

The most interesting chunk of Games by Gamers has nothing to do with branding. NOUGH runs an unusual internal playtest pipeline, and the documentary finally opens the curtain on it. At major milestones Choi streams a full playtest of the current build to the company, showing how the work in progress comes together. Periodically, the entire studio pauses normal development for a Game Day, where every employee plays as much of the build as possible and submits a survey about the experience. That feedback loop is directly credited with Lies of P's difficulty options and with major cuts and a story shift on Overture.

For a soulslike studio, that is unusually transparent and unusually gamer-coded. Most developers in the genre guard their playtests as trade secrets, and the few who talk about them publicly tend to describe closed-door external QA sessions, not company-wide feedback surveys. NOUGH is doing the opposite: turning its own studio into a structured testing pool, then publicly defending the approach as a feature. The risk is obvious. If the sequel stumbles, every employee survey that ever blessed a feature becomes a piece of evidence. If it lands, the same footage becomes a recruiting video.

What NOUGH is actually shipping next

NOUGH is still tight-lipped on the sequel's name, window, or platforms, and the documentary does not change that. What it does suggest, on purpose or not, is that the team is using the same bones that produced Lies of P and Overture, just with more runway and a clearer mandate. Choi describes the team's goal as making a game they would like to play themselves, then frames it as a credibility test with the audience: The players can always tell. Anyone who has played enough soulslikes can tell when a game has been made with real dedication.

For NEOWIZ, the parent publisher, the rebrand and the documentary also serve a quieter purpose. After years of carrying the Round 8 name under the corporate banner, the studio now has a more distinct identity to anchor marketing around the sequel's eventual reveal. NOUGH as a name is short, weird, and just ambiguous enough to land on a logo. That is more than Round 8 ever managed. The next test is whether the sequel can deliver on the studio's own pitch, which is that this is the team that already proved it can ship a soulslike people actually finish. Krat was hard. NOUGH wants to make sure the sequel does not feel harder in the wrong ways, and the next trailer will tell us whether that ambition translated.