On June 2, UK publisher Secret Mode revealed that it had picked up Chained Together from Anegar Games. The hardcore co-op platformer, which sees players climbing up from the depths of hell while chained to their friends, was released in June 2024 and has sold more than 10 million copies so far.
Secret Mode broke away from the Tencent-owned Sumo Group in March 2025, becoming independent with the help of private equity firm Emona Capital. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, Secret Mode CEO Ed Blincoe explained that Emona enabled the publisher to acquire the titles Escape the Backrooms and Star Wars: Galactic Racer, and that Emona’s backing has helped Secret Mode to “move forward” into “bigger and better opportunities.”
“We’re always on the hunt for new content,” Blincoe tells GamesIndustry.biz, “whether that comes in the form of new games or making major acquisitions such as Chained Together. We’re doing this through direct outreach, attending shows and events, inbound opportunities, and so on, and we’re constantly talking to developers, agents, and bankers to identify new opportunities.”
In terms of the Chained Together deal, Blincoe says it was led by Secret Mode and supported by Emona Capital. “We used the team internally to do the vast majority of the due diligence and leaned into the expertise that the Emona team bring on the financials.”
“Acquisitions like this are a core pillar of our strategy,” he continues, “alongside signing new titles to publish. We did a similar deal last year for our co-op horror game Escape the Backrooms, which we’ve recently released on console and have already lined up a significant content plan for.”
Escape the Backrooms from Fancy Games was launched in Early Access on Steam in August 2022, and Secret Mode came on board as publisher in August 2025. The game is set for its 1.0 Steam release on October 23 this year, and its concurrent player count has more than doubled over the past week thanks to the release of the Backrooms film, which has already become A24’s highest-grossing movie at the US box office after just six days in cinemas. According to SteamDB, Escape the Backrooms’ concurrent player count leapt up from nearly 7,500 on May 28 to nearly 17,000 on June 4. The game’s all-time peak concurrent player count is 48,879.
The Chained Together deal shares some obvious similarities with Secret Mode’s previous acquisition of Escape the Backrooms, in that it represents a proven co-op multiplayer hit with a large established player base.
Blincoe won’t go into the details of the deal for Chained Together, except to say that “through Emona we have access to significant further investment if and where it’s needed for additional deals like this.”
Now, the plan is to bring in talent to expand the game. “We’re very close to signing a new development team to help continue building content for Chained Together,” explains Blincoe. “We can’t say who it is right now, but it’s a team that we trust and who have a lot of experience in working with existing IP.”
Canadian studio Blackbird Interactive, the developer of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, was previously brought on board to port Escape the Backrooms to consoles.
Blincoe thinks there’s a strong future ahead for Secret Mode’s latest acquisition. Chained Together has an all-time peak concurrent player count of 94,480, according to SteamDB, which it achieved at launch two years ago. But since then the player count has dropped considerably: the 24-hour peak on June 4 was 5,842 players.
“We believe Chained Together has a lot of potential, and we’re already building a plan for how we want to grow the audience for the game while giving existing players a reason to come back,” says Blincoe.
“We can’t share exactly how we’re going about that right now, but we’re looking at what the existing audience has been asking for since launch, and what new experiences we can give to those players and new ones to get folks excited about this game all over again.”
