Grefberg left the company after the game's completion, and 25 employees were laid off. Many employees left Starbreeze when MachineGames recruited. Then CEO Johan Kristiansson also stepped down, and was replaced by Mikael Nemark. Nemark took the studio in a new direction. Besides focusing on AAA video games, it would also allocate resources to develop smaller, downloadable games in order to broaden the company's portfolio. These new games would no longer use the engine created by Högdahl. In 2011, Starbreeze announced that it was partnering with Epic Games to use their engine, Unreal Engine, for their first small titles. In 2012, Starbreeze announced Cold Mercury, a free-to-play video game and a project codenamed P13. Prior to that, Josef Fares, an award-winning Swedish director, had been unsuccessfully pitching game ideas to several Swedish developers. Starbreeze was in need of new, original properties, and accepted Fares' pitch. P13 later became Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Focusing on creating an emotional and "personal" experience, Starbreeze partnered with publisher 505 Games to publish the game. It was released in 2013 to critical acclaim and received numerous awards and accolades. The rights to the Brothers intellectual property was later acquired by 505 Games in 2015. After the success of Brothers, Fares announced that he had established a new studio named Hazelight and is working on a project with Electronic Arts. In 2012, Starbreeze also announced that they had acquired Overkill Software, the developer of Payday: The Heist, granting them rights to all of Overkill's proprietary technology and intellectual properties. At the time, Overkill was working on the sequel, Payday 2, a game that was set to "broaden the Payday template". While officially, Starbreeze became Overkill's parent company, those close to the situation, speaking to Eurogamer, stated that it was more that Overkill's investors, which including Overkill's founders, brothers Bo and Ulf Andersson, became Starbreeze's majority shareholders; this deal had been made to help infuse cash into both the struggling Starbreeze and to provide funds for Overkill to pursue Payday 2. Payday 2 was a massive commercial success, and was profitable from pre-order sales alone. Payday 2 also became Starbreeze's best selling game of all time, and helped the company to make a record profit for the first time after suffering an accumulated loss of $14.4 million between 1998 and June 2013. The game's success also prompted publisher 505 Games to invest $5 million in