Shift Up made an appearance during today's Summer Game Fest 2026 show, with its follow-up game to Stellar Blade revealed to be Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. While the first game followed Eve, Blood Rain focuses on a new protagonist, Evie, which certainly won't confuse anyone. Shift Up calls Blood Rain "the next chapter" in the Stellar Blade franchise, one that goes "beyond" the events of the first game. We've known that Shift Up was working on a sequel for a while now, so today's announcement was always just a case of when it would reveal rather than if it would […]

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While Stellar Blade began life as a PlayStation exclusive IP, the studio at Shift Up has been working towards making the game multiplatform for quite some time. Now for the sequel, Shift Up has confirmed plans to self-publish, rather than renew its deal with Sony. 

As part of an earnings report this month, Shift Up confirmed that development on the next Stellar Blade game has begun and that moving forward, the studio will “transition to a first-party service model”.

The aim of this transition is to get to a point where Shift Up can ship its future games across multiple platforms at launch. That should mean that Stellar Blade 2 lands on PC on day-one, and the sequel may end up appearing on Xbox and Nintendo Switch consoles as well.

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KitGuru Says: Did any of you play Stellar Blade when it landed on PS5 or PC? Do you think the sequel should be a day-one game on Steam? 

While the studio has existed for quite some time, SHIFT UP got its big break back in 2024 when they released the PS5 console exclusive Stellar Blade – a PlayStation published action-adventure title which feels like a mix of NieR: Automata and Devil May Cry. In the wake of its success, the team announced that a sequel to Stellar Blade was in the works. Though we have yet to see anything from the project, SHIFT UP have now confirmed a number of details pertaining to this much-anticipated follow-up.

Making the announcement as part of the company’s latest fiscal earnings report, studio SHIFT UP offered updates on a number of their in-development projects.

Of course, Stellar Blade is perhaps the most well-known, with the team revealing that the sequel is “progressing smoothly, on track to meet our targeted quality standard.”

While the first game was published by PlayStation, Stellar Blade’s sequel will instead be self-published, with SHIFT UP claiming that this “will allow us to lead marketing strategies that fully reflect the distinctive identity of the Stellar Blade IP.”

In terms of when to expect this upcoming title, the team did not offer any concrete dates. That said, they did confirm that “details” surrounding the much-anticipated sequel will “be revealed within the year” and so hopefully we will learn more sooner rather than later.

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KitGuru says: Are you looking forward to Stellar Blade 2? How do you think it will improve on the original? Let us know down below.

Recently, we saw an increased amount of activity from brand new studio UNBOUND – a team founded by industry legend Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame. While details surrounding Mikami’s new endeavour remain light, studio SHIFT UP (the team behind the excellent Stellar Blade) have officially announced that they have acquired the studio as part of a brand new partnership.

Making the surprise announcement via a teaser video (and expanded upon via a press release), SHIFT UP CEO Hyung-Tae Kim revealed that they have “completed the acquisition of Japanese game developer UNBOUND Inc. by acquiring all of its shares.”

While talk surrounding studio acquisitions in today’s day and age does come with some concern (especially with publishers being so trigger-happy to shut down studios), a partnership between SHIFT UP and UNBOUND could serve to benefit both companies.

As mentioned, SHIFT UP is known best for having created the PlayStation 5 exclusive Stellar Blade, however the team have also seen long-term success through a number of their gacha endeavours (most notably the Nikke series).

Given that SHIFT UP is a relatively small and new publisher, such an acquisition – serving more as a partnership – could benefit both teams massively. Unfortunately, we still know very little regarding Mikami’s next project, with the only details shared so far being that it is “developing original PC and console-based IPs targeting the global market”. Here’s to hoping that this latest acquisition proves to be a net-positive across the board.

KitGuru says: What do you think of this announcement? Is SHIFT UP a good home for Mikami and co? Let us know your thoughts down below.