Ex-Infinity Ward dev Robert Bowling launches //18.bravo with an open-source-if-we-fail promise

Robert Bowling — best known as the community face of Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare games under the handle "fourzerotwo" — has co-founded a new studio called //18.bravo. The announcement came via LinkedIn, and Bowling confirmed to IGN that the studio's first game will be a first-person shooter with a single-player narrative and PvP multiplayer.

The studio's founding principles are the headline here. //18.bravo is explicitly not building a live-service game. Instead, it's designing for what Bowling calls "forever play" — dedicated servers at launch, backed by optimized P2P architecture so players can keep playing even if the company shuts down. If the studio does go under, its bylaws legally require all assets, code, and everything needed to extend the game to go open source by default. The only carve-outs are third-party integrations and licensed music. Bowling is also publishing the legal paperwork behind this model publicly so other studios can replicate it cheaply. On the people side, leadership pay is tied to employee success, staff get a royalty program, and external contributors — voice actors, mocap performers, contractors — are eligible for profit sharing. "Video games are over commercialized," Bowling told IGN. "Live service is killing development teams, unending content treadmills of free-to-play gaming are draining players, and the AAA studio system has failed."

Bowling spent years at Infinity Ward as creative strategist across the original Modern Warfare trilogy before leaving in 2012. His most recent venture, Midnight Society, collapsed in 2025. //18.bravo is his second attempt at building something outside the traditional AAA machine. The studio's name — military phonetic alphabet, 18 Bravo being the Special Forces weapons sergeant designation — strongly signals the modern military shooter direction. The open-source commitment lands at a moment when the Stop Killing Games consumer movement is pushing back against publishers shutting down online games, and when studios like Bungie have laid off nearly half their workforce after winding down Destiny 2 support.

No release window or title for the first game has been announced yet. Whether Bowling can follow through on these commitments is the real question — the legal framework is more concrete than most studios offer, but execution is everything. The industry will be watching whether //18.bravo's model holds up once a game is actually in players' hands.