Borderlands company Gearbox buys the rights to beloved indie roguelike Risk of Rain, immediately makes a free-to-play mobile gacha game

A new Risk of Rain game is in development, and here comes the enormous but attached to that news: it's a free-to-play mobile gacha game in the works at a new studio under the series' new owner, Gearbox Publishing.

A year ago almost to the day, Gearbox Publishing officially acquired the Risk of Rain IP from original developer Hopoo Games after serving as the publisher on runaway hit Risk of Rain 2. At the recent 10-year Risk of Rain anniversary blowout, Gearbox announced Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds, a new mobile title in the works at developer Frima Studio, best known for the reasonably well-liked action RPG Disciples: Liberation, mobile spinoff Forza Street, and contributions to Fortnite's mobile version.

Hostile Worlds will be the first Risk of Rain game without Hopoo attached. It's an isometric action game explicitly built for Android and iOS devices, currently in regional testing ahead of a proper global launch. The game's been billed as a four-player hero collector which streamlines Risk of Rain's core gameplay loop – shoot, collect items, kill a boss, repeat – and marries it to free-to-play monetization. 

Your primary weapon will shoot automatically, for example, while you focus on moving around and firing special abilities, plus you can play three Survivors at once and swap between them on the fly. In co-op, all four players have their own playable squads of three Survivors. A Q&A posted to the game's official Discord sheds some more light on how it plays. Let's get a big one out of the way: "What is the in-game economy like?" 

"Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds is a hero collector-type game that encourages fans to mix and match their playstyles with a wide variety of Survivors," the post reads. "Players will be able to collect Survivors by playing and using in-game currency. All currency can be earned through play time without spending money. Players who choose to buy the in-game currency will receive in-game content at an increased pace than they would otherwise through playing."

To boil it down, you can spend real money on a currency called Sap which can then be spent "to redeem Credits, purchase fragments to unlock Survivors, or pull for random Survivors in Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds." You'll use Credits to upgrade your Survivors power level or your ship's facilities, and you can separately acquire Lunar Coins used to pull for new Survivors in a gacha loot box system. You can also earn Sap via in-game levels, while Credits and Lunar Coins will come from campaign missions as well as objectives and challenges. 

The same Q&A explains why Gearbox is making a mobile Risk of Rain to begin with. As expected, the company says it's hoping "to welcome a whole new group of players into the franchise" and "share Risk of Rain with a wider audience and enable players to step into the Risk of Rain universe wherever." 

So far, so mobile. The community's sticking points – exemplified by the mostly negative reaction to the game's debut trailer – have been many and varied, but Gearbox has addressed another big one already: this isn't taking away from the rest of Risk of Rain. 

"Gearbox remains fully committed to the future of the Risk of Rain franchise on PC and consoles. Development on Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds will not affect Risk of Rain 2 resources."

Illustrating this point, new DLC for Risk of Rain 2, called Seekers of the Storm, was also announced at the big anniversary show, and it looks like another banger to follow up Survivors of the Void. I'm once again reminded of the Diablo Immortal reveal, when Blizzard insisted that this new mobile offering would exist alongside the full-fat games that spawned it – in its case, Diablo 4. Similarly styled, of course, but independently produced and operated. 

A major point of contention has been how Hostile World's hero collector monetization will inevitably alter the gameplay that's helped make Risk of Rain so popular and fun. It remains to be seen how generous the game is with free resources, but the idea of jumping through hoops or pulling out the credit card to unlock Survivors is understandably off-putting to some fans. Risk of Rain games are among the most quintessential, no-nonsense, value-packed indies, so a game like Hostile Worlds will inevitably be compared to the experience they offer. 

More to the point, the fact that the very first non-Hopoo Risk of Rain installment is a free-to-play mobile gacha game has been seen as an ominous sign by some, even as Gearbox commits to shepherding the franchise for years to come. Free-to-play, mobile, and gacha are all dirty words to a lot of people, and I don't blame them. One of my favorite games of all time, Genshin Impact, is a free-to-play mobile gacha game, and Risk of Rain is also one of my favorite series of all time, and even I'm not in love with Hostile Worlds on its face. 

It really is the Diablo Immortal problem: a game meant for a new audience has been presented to an existing audience that's inevitably not going to be super receptive to mobile trappings because those people already have it really good with the games they know and love. Likewise, Hostile Worlds will at best be fun despite its free-to-play monetization, not because of it, and that's never been a concern with Risk of Rain games up to this point.  

As was also the case with Diablo Immortal, fans can simply not play this mobile spinoff, content with the assurance that its creation hasn't detracted from the development of mainline games. It's also not out, to be fair, so maybe it'll end up being a surprise stone-cold banger. But as a first impression, Hostile Worlds has been exactly what many Risk of Rain fans feared they'd see from the series' Gearbox era. 

There is some promising news, though. I reached out to Gearbox to see if the folks at Hopoo had been involved with Hostile Worlds whatsoever. The company sent this response over: 

"The team at Frima Studio owns the principal development of Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds. Hopoo Games, being the originators of the franchise, have been incredibly supportive throughout the development of Hostile Worlds, offering feedback at various stages. Chris Christodoulou consulted on the soundtrack with Frima’s composer Jordan Partridge as Jordan worked to blend the iconic sound of Risk of Rain with this new experience. Additionally, many members of the Gearbox team who have been working on the franchise for some time have been offering support to Frima. For example, Kayla Larson, the franchise loremaster at Gearbox, has been deeply involved in supporting the Frima Studio team from the narrative perspective. 

"Hope that helps provide a bit more context to how we are approaching. In short, we are doing all we can to ensure that creatively all the lessons learned over the years from the mainline Risk of Rain experiences is being passed along to our partners at Frima Studios working on this new title. We definitely want to make sure that players can feel the connective tissue while at the same time ensuring that each experience is custom made to best suit the platform it lives on."

Speaking of the Diablo Immortal problem: a 26-year-old JRPG cult hit ran into a very similar bugbear earlier this year.