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Coffee Stain Studios AB is a Swedish video game developer based in Skövde. Founded in 2010 by nine University of Skövde students, the company is best known for Goat Simulator, whi…
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Coffee Stain Studios AB is a Swedish video game developer based in Skövde. Founded in 2010 by nine University of Skövde students, the company is best known for Goat Simulator, which was released in April 2014, and Satisfactory, released in September 2024.
Coffee Stain Studios AB is a Swedish video game developer based in Skövde. Founded in 2010 by nine University of Skövde students, the company is best known for Goat Simulator, which was released in April 2014, and Satisfactory, released in September 2024. Their parent holding company also operates Coffee Stain Publishing, a publisher, and majority-owns developers Coffee Stain North (formerly Gone North Games) and Lavapotion. In November 2018, Coffee Stain Holding was acquired by THQ Nordic AB (later known as Embracer Group). In December 2025, Coffee Stain spun off from Embracer Group and became an independent, publicly traded company, known as Coffee Stain Group.
Coffee Stain Studios was founded in 2010 in Skövde, Sweden, by a group of nine students at the University of Skövde: Anton Westbergh, Johannes Aspeby, Mikael Mård, Oscar Jilsén, Gustaf Tivander, Daniel Lundwall, Markus Rännare, Joakim Sjöö and Stefan Hanna. Their first game, I Love Strawberries, was released at the end of that year for iOS by Atari.
In 2010, Coffee Stain participated in "Make Something Unreal", a modding competition for Unreal Tournament 3 held by Epic Games and Intel, with its mod, Sanctum. The mod was received well, leading Coffee Stain to adopt the Unreal Development Kit to develop Sanctum into a standalone game. In March the following year, the company struck a five-year licensing agreement with Epic for their Unreal Engine 3 technology. Sanctum as a standalone game was released in April 2011, and was followed by a sequel, Sanctum 2, in May 2013. In February 2014, Coffee Stain acquired the rights for I Love Strawberries from Atari and re-released the game for iOS with some improvements.
Coffee Stain gained significant recognition with their April 2014 release of Goat Simulator. While the title received mixed critical reviews, as it was released in a purposely buggy state to take advantage of its ragdoll physics, it became highly successful through Let's Play videos and live streamers. By August 2014, Goat Simulator had outperformed all sales of the studio's previous games combined, and had generated over US$12 million in revenue by March 2016.
On 23 February 2017, Coffee Stain announced Coffee Stain Publishing, a subsidiary that would act as the publishing entity within the Coffee Stain group. The first title to be released through Coffee Stain Publishing was Huntdown by Swedish development team Easy Trigger Games. The following day, Coffee Stain acquired a minority stake in Danish developer Ghost Ship Games, and became the publisher of their upcoming game, Deep Rock Galactic. In April 2017, Coffee Stain also gained a minority stake in newly founded Gothenburg-based studio Lavapotion. In July 2017, Daniel Kaplan, the first employee of Swedish developer Mojang, left Mojang to join Coffee Stain Publishing.
On 30 January 2018, Coffee Stain announced Levelling the Playing Field, a funding initiative aimed at small companies that employ at least as many women as men and require at most 1 million kr (about $127,000) in funding. Through this initiative, Coffee Stain invested in Danish developer Other Tales Interactive (a team of two women) in exchange for a minority stake. A second studio, Stockholm-based Kavalri, was invested in under this programme in November 2019. The following day, Coffee Stain acquired a majority stake in Gone North Games, a Swedish developer that had developed Coffee Stain-published and downloadable content for . With the acquisition, Gone North Games was rebranded as Coffee Stain North.
Box Dragon in Gothenburg, Sweden, founded in 2020, majority stake purchased in August 2021. (majority)
Coffee Stain Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden, founded as Shortcake AB, acquired in August 2022.
Source: Coffee Stain Studios (CC BY-SA)
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On 14 November 2018, the Coffee Stain group of companies and its intellectual property were acquired by Swedish holding company THQ Nordic AB (later known as Embracer Group) for 317 million kr (about $34.9 million), with the potential of additional payouts should they reach certain milestones. Coffee Stain continues to operate independently within Embracer Group, with Coffee Stain co-founder Westbergh remaining chief executive officer. At the time, the Coffee Stain group had 45 employees, of whom Coffee Stain Studios employed 24. This number rose to 25 by August 2019.
Coffee Stain expanded Levelling the Playing Field in September 2020 to cover teams including racially and ethnically diverse people, women and non-binary people. Happy Broccoli Games became the third investment under this initiative. On November 18, 2020, Embracer announced it would purchase out the 40% stake in Coffee Stain North from their founders and transition it to a fully owned subsidiary of Coffee Stain.
In August 2021, Embracer Group acquired Ghost Ship Games and Easy Trigger, putting them both under the umbrella of Coffee Stain Holding.
In February 2022, the company announced the formation of Coffee Stain Malmö, a support studio focusing on mobile titles, with Coffee Stain vice president of mobile Daniel Persson heading it. The following month, Coffee Stain announced that it had partnered with Rare Earth Games, an Austrian developer owned by Coffee Stain's sister company Amplifier Game Invest, to publish a new co-op action IP.
In August 2022, as part of a large purchase of properties, Embracer was confirmed to have acquired a "secret developer" for $100 million which would transition under Coffee Stain. In December, it was revealed by several news outlets that the purchase was of the Roblox game developer Shortcake AB and its game Welcome to Bloxburg for $100 million, and renamed the studio as Coffee Stain Gothenburg. The game's creator, Coeptus, officially confirmed the new partnership in January 2023.
In May 2025, Embracer Group announced that it would be spinning off Coffee Stain Holding and its related subsidiaries into an independent company. The spin off was completed on 11 December 2025, with the new company, Coffee Stain Group, trading on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market.
In April 2026, Coffee Stain Malmö head Daniel Persson revealed on LinkedIn that the studio was shut down.
