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Rogue Point Aims to Prove Old School Is the New Cool with a Back-to-Basics Shooter
•February 12, 2026
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Why It Matters
Rogue Point proves there is commercial appetite for low‑barrier, friend‑focused shooters, signaling a shift toward smaller, sustainable AA projects that prioritize gameplay over size. This could encourage publishers to back more niche, retro‑inspired experiences.
Key Takeaways
- •Retro co‑op shooter launches Early Access, no DLC planned.
- •10 GB size, peer‑to‑peer multiplayer ensures longevity.
- •Funded by Team 17 after chaotic publisher search.
- •Focus on art direction over cutting‑edge tech.
- •Targets AA market to fill indie‑AAA gap.
Pulse Analysis
The indie‑friendly "friendslop" genre has exploded as gamers grow weary of grind‑centric shooters that demand endless time and microtransactions. Rogue Point taps into this trend by delivering bite‑sized, cooperative missions that can be completed in a single sitting, making it ideal for casual play with friends. Its design philosophy—quick pick‑up, hard‑to‑master—mirrors the success of titles like RV There Yet? and Peak, while its retro aesthetic offers a nostalgic hook without feeling dated.
From a development standpoint, Rogue Point showcases how efficiency can trump raw horsepower. By capping the install size at roughly 10 GB and opting for peer‑to‑peer networking, the team sidesteps the massive server costs and storage bloat typical of contemporary shooters such as Call of Duty Warzone. The decision to stay on Unreal Engine 4, despite the arrival of UE5, reflects a pragmatic focus on art direction and gameplay polish rather than chasing the latest visual bells and whistles. This lean approach, honed from the studio’s earlier work on Black Mesa, demonstrates that high‑quality experiences can be delivered without the overhead of cutting‑edge technology.
Business-wise, securing Team 17 as a publisher after a rocky outreach process underscores the growing willingness of mid‑size publishers to back AA titles that fill the gap between indie experimentation and AAA risk. Rogue Point’s profit‑sharing model and DLC‑free promise align with a consumer base that values ownership and longevity. As more developers adopt this sustainable, small‑scale model, the industry may see a resurgence of games that prioritize fun, community, and accessibility over endless content pipelines, reshaping the shooter landscape for the next generation of players.
Rogue Point aims to prove old school is the new cool with a back-to-basics shooter
Rogue Point: A Retro‑Style Co‑Op Shooter for Friends
“We wanted something that you could pick up and play with friends,” says Brad Sheremeta, marketing and community manager for Crowbar Collective, describing the studio’s new game, Rogue Point. Out in Early Access today, the co‑operative PvE shooter is a response to the overly complicated, time‑sink nature of modern titles in the genre.
“Right now, you're seeing a lot of these games that are ‘sweaty games’ that you have to grind at, especially first‑person shooters,” Sheremeta says, citing Counter‑Strike as an example of a competitive experience that can feel frustrating. By contrast, Rogue Point aims to be a title that’s more about having a laugh with friends.
Image: Brad Sheremeta
The game fits into the broader narrative of the rise of “friendslop” titles like RV There Yet? or Peak, which have garnered huge audiences with the promise of simply mucking about with mates. The retro, no‑frills nature of Rogue Point also fills a market gap for titles that echo the simpler times of old – reminiscent of the hugely successful Warhammer Space Marine 2, which won players over with its unashamedly Xbox 360‑era gameplay.
Crowbar Collective owner Adam Engels describes Rogue Point as “a little bit of a back‑to‑basics.” He emphasizes that everything is contained within one package, rather than being split across expensive DLC.
“We were talking to some other people earlier about how we used to get a game and it was the game. And we'd like to encourage that and see more of that industry‑wide.”
Image: Adam Engels
“To give a good example, when Rocket League came out… if you wanted to, you could go and buy a car for a small amount of money. The game had a low barrier to entry, the DLCs had a low barrier of entry. We don’t have any DLCs planned yet, but that type of really player‑friendly model seems fair, like, ‘I want this one car, I bought that one car.’”
“And then going back to games like GoldenEye, too, if you wanted the cheats for the game, you played the game, and you did these challenges to unlock these different modifiers – which is something we want to implement post‑release in the game.”
One of the old school
Rogue Point is considerate of players’ time. It consists of eight missions across four maps, where teams of four face increasingly hard waves of enemies, collecting and buying weapons along the way. Sessions are relatively short but replayable thanks to randomized objectives, objects, and multiple difficulty levels.
“It’s a shorter, tight‑knit game,” says Sheremeta. “But that’s OK. I think a lot of games nowadays, you’re on this constant grind… and it’s like, ‘I’ve got to keep playing to get to this, to get to this…’”
The game can be played casually or tactically: “If you want to play and just YOLO through the whole thing, you can. If you want to play tactically, you can. It’s easy to pick up, it’s hard to master.”
“It’s something we’re really proud of, because especially for first‑person shooters, there’s nothing out there right now that has that classic feel. It feels retro without being derogatory, like it’s too old school.”
Image: Rogue Point (screenshot)
Work on Rogue Point started in 2020.
Even the online functionality feels retro, running on peer‑to‑peer rather than dedicated servers. As Engels notes, this means that if you “buy the game and want to play it 10 years from now, it’ll play just fine,” which will please the “Stop Killing Games” crowd.
The game is also tiny: Engels is proud that it’s around 10 GB, a far cry from the 100‑GB‑plus install sizes of shooters like Call of Duty Warzone. “I mean, certain other games, you’d be like, ‘Oh, I’d really like to revisit that game,’ then you look at the file size and you’re like, ‘Maybe not.’” Rogue Point loads lightning‑quick thanks to an efficient texturing technique called trim sheets – only a few textures are loaded and reused throughout the level.
This coding trick was learned the hard way through Crowbar Collective’s experience remaking Half‑Life over a decade. “We did not do that stuff on Black Mesa, and it haunted us,” Engels recalls. That experience gave the team a solid footing when development began in 2020, though the studio still faced many challenges.
Funding drive
Crowbar Collective emerged from a fan‑remake project and is founded on profit‑sharing principles – something Engels is “really proud” of. He admits it makes life hard as a CEO:
“Because the company’s not making a ton of money off of Black Mesa, the developers are. And that’s the way we want it, but it does make operating a company quite difficult.”
Image: Rogue Point (screenshot)
Funding for Rogue Point came from Team 17, but finding a publisher was chaotic. “People would ghost you. They’d be like, ‘Oh, well, we’ll be in touch,’ and then they actually don’t get in touch. The best ones were like, ‘Hey, we had a great meeting. We don’t think your game’s right for us, but hit us up in the future if you have another game.’”
Sheremeta adds that the process was confusing, with publisher offers varying widely. “Does this make sense for us?” became a constant question. In the end, Team 17 “felt right.”
Engels notes that securing publishing deals has become harder since Rogue Point was funded. Publishers now often demand a demo or vertical slice before even talking about the game, which he calls “insane.” Creating a vertical slice for Rogue Point required a lot of money and effort.
Image: Rogue Point (enemy types)
Engels expresses some sympathy for publishers: “I’m not here to defend giant conglomerates, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding about a publisher’s role and the repercussions of the deal.” He praises Team 17 for providing resources such as QA that the studio wouldn’t otherwise have.
Crowbar Collective’s prior work on Black Mesa gave it industry connections that helped secure the publishing deal.
Leap into the unknown
“We wanted to do a very small game, learn an engine, and build a company,” says Engels, describing the mission for Rogue Point. While Black Mesa used Valve’s Source engine, Rogue Point switched to Unreal Engine 4, which partly explains why the “small” game took around five years.
“We knew we didn’t know what we were doing, because going from the Source engine to the Unreal Engine is just a massive jump,” Engels says. Adding to the difficulty, Rogue Point is a multiplayer title, whereas Black Mesa was a narrative‑driven single‑player game. Because Black Mesa was a remake, the team already knew its endpoint; Rogue Point, by contrast, was a “terrifying blank slate.”
Image: Rogue Point (screenshot)
Unreal Engine 5 arrived halfway through development, but the team stayed with UE4 to avoid the resource cost of switching. The focus remained on efficiency rather than cutting‑edge graphics.
“For me personally, I do think that art direction is much more important than technology,” Engels explains. “You can turn on all the switches in your game, and it won’t be the same as art direction. That’s why a lot of older games still hold up – they have masterful art direction. Titanfall 2 is a great example: that’s on the Source engine, the same engine we used for Black Mesa.”
“Zooming out, I think you probably could save a lot of time and money by not diving into as many graphical features. I don’t want to name names, but I’ve heard dev diaries of people talking about this tech that they did for a tiny feature, and it’s like, ‘Wow, is anybody going to see that in the grand scheme of things?’”
“For me personally, I do think that art direction is much more important than technology.” – Adam Engels
He cites Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive as a recent example of a good balance between technology and art direction.
Looking ahead, Engels hopes more games will target the AA market that Rogue Point occupies:
“I think there’s a big gap in the industry for that now, and there has been for a while. We want to make games in general that are a pilot for the idea, so that publishers or developers aren’t risking tons of money on ideas that may fail, because you never know until the game’s out. So I think we’ll see more interesting ideas if we have that AA market where we test things. The indie space is just filling in all the gaps for creativity.”
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