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    Stellar Blade studio Shift Up has gifted all its staff $3,400, AirPods Max and an Apple Watch

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    Stellar Blade studio Shift Up has gifted all its staff $3,400, AirPods Max and an Apple Watch

    Stellar Blade studio Shift Up has once again given all its employees an expensive gift to thank them for the previous year’s work.

    As reported by Seoul Economic Daily, the South Korean studio celebrated the new year by giving its roughly 300 staff cash bonuses and Apple products.

    The company gave each of its staff a set of Apple AirPods Max, an Apple Watch and a bonus of ₩5 million ($3,400), a total value of more than $4,000 per employee.

    This isn’t the first time Shift Up has given its entire staff gifts to mark its continued success. In January 2023, it gave its employees iPhone 14s and other incentives, and the following year it gave them all prepaid credit cards with ₩10 million ($6,800) preloaded onto them.

    In January 2025 it gifted all of its employees a PlayStation 5 Pro and a bonus of ₩5 million ($3,400), then in June – to celebrate the sale of 3 million copies of Stellar Blade – it gifted everyone a Nintendo Switch 2.

    Shift Up has previously explained to South Korean media that the regular bonuses are intended to encourage the existing talent at the company.

    The Seoul-based studio was founded in 2013 by Kim Hyung Tae, who remains its CEO and chairman of the board. In summer 2024 Shift Up achieved South Korea’s largest initial public offering (IPO) for a video game company in three years, raising ₩435 billion won ($295 million) on its first day of trading. Shift Up said it planned to use the IPO proceeds to diversify its game portfolios.

    In November, Shift Up announced a publishing partnership with Tencent for one of its upcoming games. Project Spirits, a cross-platform game coming to PC, consoles and mobile, will be published by Tencent Games’ global publishing brand Level Infinite as part of the agreement.

    Level Infinite previously published Goddess of Victor: Nikke, the PC and mobile game released in 2022 before Shift Up found huge success with the Sony-published Stellar Blade.

    Last year, Shift Up confirmed it’s planning a sequel to Stellar Blade, with a projected release window listed in its financial results as coming by the end of 2027. Indeed, the company’s May financial results suggested that the sequel to Stellar Blade is planned to release before Project Spirits.