I’ve never watched this channel but this interview with Director Hakan Abrak just popped on my feed.
“It’s not a Hitman game, but it is an IO Interactive game.”
Hakan admits GTA’s delay gave the studio some more breathing room to polish and release.
He compares First Light’s TacSim to Hitman’s single-player live-service content, promising lots of added content over time, and presumably new gameplay experimentation. (On a personal note, I’m happy and excited that this mode will exist. Playing through the main game a couple of times, making different on-the-fly choices, will be fun, but IO smartly knows that you need a hook to get people to keep booting up your game. I don’t usually care for this single player side content, like what the Resident Evil games have, but I think TacSim challenges will keep me coming back for more.)
“It’s running on Switch” … but obviously not well enough, yet.
In the context of Mindseye: IO Partners, the publishing wing, is a different thing from IO Interactive. The experience has not turned IO Partners off of publishing, but they might want to be more involved in the games they’ll be publishing, in the future.
IO’s close relationship with the community that they’ve built over the past decade since becoming independent is something that is pivotal moving forward.
Speculation about Project Fantasy’s funding partner. Hakan neither confirms nor denies. He does affirm that Project Fantasy is in “a very healthy place,” and later states that they’re “very very far into” it.
Finally, he looks forward to “getting into the weeds with Hitman again,” noting that there hasn’t been space for that recently with First Light and Project Fantasy, but that the team “cannot wait to get into the engine room and upgrade, invent, innovate Hitman” for us again 
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