Just read about this in my LinkedIn feed of all places, as someone who's in the game development industry in Spain I know a lot of people that used to work at Novarama and I've seen their CEO many times at game dev talks and conferences, so it's kind of surreal to see a video from him explaining what happened:
View: https://youtu.be/vCgWhDRGT9A?feature=shared
Cliffnotes version of the video:
* Novarama was founded 20 years ago, and mostly gained notoriety while working with Sony to create the Invizimals games.
* Once it was clear that the Sony handheld market wasn't long for this world after Vita, they started to develop their first Steam game (Killsquad), which was moderately successful. It sold 350k copies.
* Inspired by the success of Fortnite, PUBG and Rust they decided to try to go big and started working on United 1944, an online WWII shooter with crafting and survival elements. As many other companies, they expanded very quickly during the Covid years.
* The studio rapidly expanded during those years, nearly tripling in size and having a peak of 70-ish employees. Tencent invested in the studio during this time, which allowed them to improve the working conditions of their employees and offer higher wages.
* Shortly after announcing United 1944 at GDC 2023, that the market for those kinds of games was already saturated, and the business environment for game studios was rapidly changing for the worse. This is when many other studios started to lay off people or shut down.
* The game is currently available on Steam in early access, but it failed to gain an audience.
* They've been trying to save the company for the last 8 months, including engaging in talks to sell the studio. Unfortunately, all of these talks fell through as of last week, so they've run out of options.
* The studio has now declared bankrupcy, and will likely shut down in the next few days. They've tried to be transparent to their employees over the last few months so they could start looking for new jobs well ahead of time.
View: https://youtu.be/vCgWhDRGT9A?feature=shared
Cliffnotes version of the video:
* Novarama was founded 20 years ago, and mostly gained notoriety while working with Sony to create the Invizimals games.
* Once it was clear that the Sony handheld market wasn't long for this world after Vita, they started to develop their first Steam game (Killsquad), which was moderately successful. It sold 350k copies.
* Inspired by the success of Fortnite, PUBG and Rust they decided to try to go big and started working on United 1944, an online WWII shooter with crafting and survival elements. As many other companies, they expanded very quickly during the Covid years.
* The studio rapidly expanded during those years, nearly tripling in size and having a peak of 70-ish employees. Tencent invested in the studio during this time, which allowed them to improve the working conditions of their employees and offer higher wages.
* Shortly after announcing United 1944 at GDC 2023, that the market for those kinds of games was already saturated, and the business environment for game studios was rapidly changing for the worse. This is when many other studios started to lay off people or shut down.
* The game is currently available on Steam in early access, but it failed to gain an audience.
* They've been trying to save the company for the last 8 months, including engaging in talks to sell the studio. Unfortunately, all of these talks fell through as of last week, so they've run out of options.
* The studio has now declared bankrupcy, and will likely shut down in the next few days. They've tried to be transparent to their employees over the last few months so they could start looking for new jobs well ahead of time.
