Shift Up once reached a point during Stellar Blade's development when it could cover only about three months of salaries, CEO Hyung-Tae Kim said in a wide-ranging interview with Korean outlet Inven. The admission puts a concrete financial limit on a project that investors had already warned the studio might not recoup.
Kim said Shift Up visited several investors and large companies while seeking support. According to his account, many treated Stellar Blade as a risk to the business and questioned why the studio was building a game they believed would fail to break even. Some suggested that dropping it for another project would make the company more valuable.
The skepticism was not only external. Kim said he also wondered whether it made sense to build that kind of game in Korea. Shift Up nevertheless carried the project through development, and he now describes players' response as the proof that the studio's chosen path was not wrong.
Players changed the company's position
Kim credited players with giving Shift Up the ability to continue making Stellar Blade and pursue better games. He did not identify the investors, date the payroll crunch or explain precisely how the company closed its funding gap, so the interview does not support a detailed reconstruction of the rescue.
It does establish how close the project came to a hard operating limit. Payroll runway measures how long a company can continue paying staff at its current cash level. In this case, Kim's estimate refers specifically to salary capacity, not necessarily every remaining company expense, and should not be read as a formal insolvency filing or closure announcement.
Eurogamer's English-language report surfaced the account outside Korea and described the later game as a success. The stronger evidence for Kim's claims is the original Inven interview, where the remarks appear in his closing message to players.
The disclosure arrives during a new expansion
The interview accompanied Shift Up's preparations for a Nintendo Switch 2 version of Stellar Blade. Inven reports that the Complete Edition is scheduled for November 6 and is designed to preserve the action and visual presentation of the existing releases, with a 60-frames-per-second target across most docked and handheld play.
Kim also said the studio intends to keep supporting the original game, even as it expands its publishing plans and future projects. That current position makes the development-era constraint more than a dramatic anecdote: it explains why he frames continued work on the series as something players made possible, while leaving the exact financing history unresolved.
