Six Million Copies Later: How a Medieval Bohemian RPG Became the Czech Tech Sector's Best Export

The numbers

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, the open-world RPG from Prague-based Warhorse Studios, launched in February 2025 and had sold one million copies within 24 hours and two million within two weeks. By November 2025 it had passed four million units; by February 2026, five million; by June 2026, more than six million copies worldwide, according to publisher Deep Silver and Embracer Group, Warhorse's Swedish-listed parent. The game also picked up the BAFTA Games Award for Best Narrative and multiple Game of the Year nominations, giving Warhorse both a commercial and critical result that few Central European studios have matched. Warhorse's annual revenue is now estimated at around $16 million, and the studio, founded in 2011 by Daniel Vávra and Martin Klíma, has grown from a handful of employees who financed the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance partly through Kickstarter to roughly 250 staff today, with two new open-world RPGs — a further Kingdom Come instalment and a separate project set in Middle-earth — now in development.

The cluster behind the studio

Warhorse's success did not emerge in isolation. Its founders and much of its senior team came directly from two earlier Czech studios: Illusion Softworks (later 2K Czech), the Brno-founded studio behind the Mafia series, and Bohemia Interactive, the Prague-based developer of the Arma military-simulation franchise and, more recently, the multiplayer survival game DayZ. Bohemia Interactive, founded in 1999 and still independently owned by co-founders Marek and Ondřej Španěl, employs more than 500 people and has never taken outside investment or sold to a publisher — an unusual profile for a studio operating at its scale, and one that has let it keep long-running franchises like Arma in-house across two decades rather than through a series of studio acquisitions.

The overlap in personnel is not incidental. Czech game-industry veterans have described the country's studio scene of the late 1990s and 2000s as small enough — teams of 30 to 50 people were considered mainstream at the time — that individual developers moved between two or three of the same handful of Prague and Brno studios repeatedly, carrying technical know-how and production discipline from one project to the next. That density is part of why Warhorse, when it needed programmers with CryEngine experience or 3D artists who had already shipped an open-world title, could recruit from Bohemia Interactive and 2K Czech alumni rather than building a team from scratch.

The exit precedent

Warhorse itself is not fully independent. In February 2019, the studio was acquired by Koch Media (renamed PLAION in 2022) for €42.8 million — a deal struck the same month the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance shipped, when the studio had just 131 employees. That acquisition gave Warhorse the balance sheet and publishing muscle to build a substantially larger sequel without the multi-year Kickstarter-dependent development cycle of the first game, while Bohemia Interactive's continued independence offers a live counterfactual for what a comparable Czech studio looks like without a publisher parent.

What this adds up to

Between Warhorse's roughly $16 million in annual revenue, Bohemia Interactive's 500-plus employees and multi-decade franchise ownership, and the smaller studios — Amanita Design, Beat Games (acquired by Meta in 2019) and others — that have grown out of the same talent pool, Czech game development represents a software export category that generates real, internationally distributed revenue without depending on the venture-capital funding cycle that most of the country's SaaS and AI startups still run on. It is, in other words, a tech-sector success story that doesn't show up in most VC-funding league tables — because it was largely never built with venture money at all.