Two Point Studios at 10: How a small sim studio proved Microsoft wrong and won big for Sega

Two Point Studios is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and Polygon sat down with co-founders Gary Carr and Ben Hymers alongside COO Jo Koehler to talk about how a small studio making niche management sims survived — and thrived — in an industry that keeps eating smaller developers alive.

The studio's roots go back to Lionhead Studios, the Fable developer shut down by Microsoft in 2016. Carr and Hymers had worked together there on projects including Lionhead's studio sim The Movies, and Hymers kept pushing Carr on a question that seemed obvious to him: why aren't they making games like the old Bullfrog classics anymore? The answer, as far as Microsoft was concerned, was blunt. "We need billion-dollar franchises. We leave that kind of money on the table," Carr recalled Xbox management saying when they pitched sim concepts — a line he says genuinely irked him. That attitude effectively killed the idea internally, but Hymers' conviction that nostalgia for management games still had real commercial pull eventually changed Carr's mind. "I think we assumed [sim games] had probably had their day, if I'm honest," Carr said. "Ben definitely made me think twice about that assumption."

Carr, Hymers, and fellow co-founder Mark Webley decided that if Microsoft was happy to walk away from that money, someone else would take it. They pitched themselves deliberately "below AAA" and landed a roughly 18-month contract with Sega in 2016 — right as Microsoft was closing Lionhead's doors. That timing gave the newly formed Two Point Studios a ready-made team to draw from. The result was Two Point Hospital, a spiritual successor to Bullfrog's 1997 classic Theme Hospital, which launched in 2018 and turned out to be exactly the surprise hit Sega hadn't expected. The studio has since followed it with Two Point Campus and, most recently, Two Point Museum, which has earned strong reviews.

Reaching a decade as a small, focused studio making management sims — not live-service games, not massive open worlds — is increasingly rare, and Two Point's longevity makes a quiet argument against the industry's obsession with scale. The full Polygon interview covers more ground on how the studio kept its identity intact through corporate pressures, and with Two Point Museum still fresh and performing well, the studio shows no signs of slowing down.