Hazelight’s Josef Fares Announces New Game, Mentioning EA Can’t Interfere
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- Hazelight Studios has already started work on its next game, according to the company’s founder and game director, Josef Fares.
- Fares emphasized that Electronic Arts respects Hazelight’s creative freedom and has no influence over their projects.
- The latest Hazelight’s game Split Fiction sold 1 million units in 48 hours after launch and then reached the 2 million copies sold in its first week.
The new game from Hazelight Studios has been in the works for about a month already, according to the company’s founder, Josef Fares. The director of Hazelight’s Split Fiction, It Takes Two and A Way Out that were published by Electronic Arts, revealed the news during the 64th episode of Friends Per Second podcast.
Speaking on the podcast Fares revealed that the team is working on the new project in high spirits and full of confidence for what’s to come due to the success of the company’s latest project, Split Fiction.
“Split Fiction is the best-received game we’ve done, everybody is super happy, but I’m so fully focused and excited on the next thing,” Fares stated. It is worth noting that Split Fiction has sold 1 million units in 48 hours after launch and then reached the 2 million copies sold mark in its first week.
On top of that, at the time of writing, the game has an Overwhelmingly Positive status on Steam, with a total number of 28,933 reviews. The game also has earned a 10/10 score from GameSpot and 91 from Metacritic, becoming EA’s first game to achieve a 90+ rating in over a decade after Mass Effect 3 in 2012. It is also worth mentioning that Split Fiction peaked at a concurrent player count of 259,003 on Steam by March 9, 2025, and became the second-largest EA-published game on the platform, surpassing Battlefield V and FIFA 23 and becoming second only to Apex Legends, which holds the record at 624,473 concurrent players as of the time of writing.
While details about the new project remain under wraps, Fares assured that co-op gameplay, a hallmark of all Hazelight games, would remain in the next project. However, he hinted that the studio might explore new directions in the future, including single-player experiences, though with the distinct “Hazelight twist.”
Fares also addressed Hazelight’s partnership with Electronic Arts, publisher of Hazelight’s games, saying, “They have zero to say about what we are doing next. They respect us. They respect what we do. I am very clear with them that they cannot interfere with what we do.” Nevertheless, he acknowledged that it might be true that EA is “f**king up” its partnerships with other companies.
