CI Games began in 2002 as City Interactive, formed in Poland through the merger of three companies - Lemon Interactive, We Open Eyes and Tatanka - and spent its early years working as both a developer and a distributor of budget-priced games. In 2007 it consolidated with Oni Games, a publisher created alongside City Interactive in 2002, and with Detalion Art, an adventure game studio founded by Roland Pantoła and colleagues who had left LK Avalon; the same year the company completed its initial public offering on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The decisive turn came in 2008, when management discontinued the budget range to pursue bigger productions. Sniper: Ghost Warrior (2010) marked that repositioning, and by mid-2011 roughly 150 staff were working across the Warsaw headquarters and studios in Rzeszów, Katowice, Poznań and Guildford. The development division adopted the CI Games name in 2012 and the whole company rebranded as CI Games in 2013, closing the book on the budget-label era.
The rebrand was followed by the company's most ambitious year. Enemy Front (2014) carried its shooter craft into the resistance fighting of World War II, and Lords of the Fallen, released on October 28, 2014 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, was co-developed with Frankfurt's Deck13 under director Jan Klose and producer Tomasz Gop, with CI Games publishing and Bandai Namco Games handling the physical North American console versions. It passed 900,000 copies sold by May 2015 and stands as one of the earliest attempts by an established studio at the deliberate, punishing action RPG combat that Dark Souls had made famous; Steam now lists it as Lords Of The Fallen 2014 to set it apart from the reboot. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 (2017) sold over one million copies, but its difficult production led to a February 2018 downsizing to about 30 people, after which the company rebuilt around Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts (2019) and Contracts 2 (2021), launched the United Label indie publishing division in January 2019, and grew past 140 staff in 2020-2021. The new Lords of the Fallen from subsidiary studio Hexworks arrived on October 13, 2023, though a 10% workforce reduction in January 2024 and a further 30 cuts that May followed, and Lords of the Fallen II is announced as the next entry. Still headquartered in Warsaw under CEO Marek Tymiński and listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, CI Games remains the Polish publisher behind two distinct disciplines: the long-range patience of the Sniper Ghost Warrior series and the unforgiving swordplay of Lords of the Fallen.
