Starbreeze began in 1998 in Härnösand, Sweden, founded by Magnus Högdahl, a former member of the Triton demoscene group, and its first project, Sorcery, was canceled before release. In 2001 it merged with Uppsala-based O3 Games, a 1998 startup known for the 2000 space strategy game The Outforce, keeping the Starbreeze name, and on November 27, 2002 the parent company was renamed Starbreeze AB. What followed was a run that earned the studio a reputation for atmospheric, technically ambitious action games, usually made for another publisher. Enclave (2002) was a dark fantasy action game; The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004, Vivendi Games) turned a film tie-in into a first-person prison break mixing stealth, brawling and shooting, and is still widely regarded as one of the finest licensed games ever made; The Darkness (2007, 2K Games) brought the same moody first-person craft to a comic adaptation; and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (2009, Atari) paired a remastered Butcher Bay with a new campaign. Syndicate (2012, Electronic Arts) reimagined Bullfrog's classic as a first-person shooter and became a commercial disappointment, after which many senior staff left to found MachineGames, while Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013, 505 Games), a fairy tale in which a single controller steers two brothers at once, proved the studio could tell a quiet, affecting story as well as a violent one.
The 2012 acquisition of Overkill Software, maker of PAYDAY: The Heist, changed the company's direction. PAYDAY 2 followed in 2013, and in 2015 Starbreeze announced a move into publishing independent games, starting with RAID: World War II, alongside StarVR, a virtual reality headset in which it sold a 66.7% stake to Acer in October 2017. In 2016 it bought the PAYDAY IP back from 505 Games. The expansion ended abruptly when Overkill's The Walking Dead underperformed after its November 2018 release: Starbreeze filed for reconstruction on December 3, 2018, CEO Bo Andersson stepped down, and through 2019 the company sold its Dhruva Interactive stake to Rockstar Games and the Psychonauts 2 publishing rights to Microsoft, laid off about a quarter of its staff and split into New Starbreeze Publishing AB and New Starbreeze Studios AB, before the reconstruction was completed and approved by the court on December 6, 2019. A €50 million publishing deal with Koch Media, signed in 2021, carried PAYDAY 3 to its 2023 release under Deep Silver, and in 2024 the company licensed Notoriety: A PAYDAY Experience on Roblox. Adolf Kristjansson became CEO on March 31, 2025, and that October Starbreeze discontinued Project Baxter, its Dungeons & Dragons game, to concentrate on PAYDAY, handing PC maintenance of PAYDAY 2 to partner studio Sidetrack Games so its own teams could stay on PAYDAY 3. Headquartered in Stockholm and publishing today as Starbreeze Entertainment, the company is now the home of the heist shooter, and its catalog runs from some of the most respected first-person games of the 2000s to a co-op shooter still receiving new heists more than a decade after launch.
