9th January 2024
NOMAD GAMES 2023 RETROSPECTIVE
Hello everyone!
2023 was a wild year for us here at Nomad Games, with the launch of CATAN® - Console Edition marking an important milestone for us as a studio in more ways than one. We also watched as major shifts happened in the games industry, our team expanded and we continued working hard on our future projects.
With so many things happening to our small studio over the past year, we wanted to look back on what lessons we can learn, where we can improve and what we can do differently in 2024 and beyond! So we’ll be going over each major milestone from last year, to see where we can do better and making sure that we continue making even better games for you all.
By publicly and transparently communicating where we feel like we can improve (and how exactly we’re going to do that improving), we hope to start the year off on the right foot with ourselves and with you too! There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive in:
By far the biggest thing that happened to our small games studio in 2023 was the full launch of CATAN® - Console Edition onto Xbox and PlayStation (and eventually Nintendo Switch, but we’ll get to that later!).
Without a doubt the biggest launch in our history, CATAN was met with much love from veteran CATAN players and new players alike. The community that has built up around the game over the last year has also been supportive, appreciative and just generally really cool! Throughout 2023, we’ve kept working hard to release patches, updates and fixes that have been requested and reported by the community.
We’re no strangers to working with well-known board games, but CATAN put our studio on the map in a way that nothing else had previously. With the wealth of additional expansions already available for the physical game, we were able to dive straight into making The Helpers and The Cities & Knights expansions, meaning we could keep iterating and improving the game throughout the year, something we’ve not always been able to do with our games post-launch.
Watching the game go from strength to strength through 2023 has been great, and the team here at Nomad are immensely proud of what they managed to accomplish. We’ve also spent 2023 working on new CATAN stuff (such as The Cities & Knights Expansion)!
If you want to check out all our hard work on the game in one place, head over to the official CATAN - Console Edition website.
Lessons Learned:
After we launched CATAN - Console Edition, a number of members of the community pointed out quality of life features that they were surprised to see not implemented in the launch version of the game. While we were able to quickly implement a turn timer for online play, we know that a number of players were still frustrated that it’d not been there from day 1.
For future game releases, we’re going to pay more attention to features that other similar games have included and also ask the community what they’d expect to see in a game earlier in the process of making it. For example, we’ll be sending out a player survey for our upcoming secret game project to see what kind of features players will expect to see in a game at launch.
Alongside launching the base game for CATAN - Console Edition, we also released some exciting additions to the game in 2023 in the form of The Helpers Expansion, the Season Pass and seasonal content packs!
Our first piece of DLC was The Helpers, a smaller expansion for CATAN that adds a number of characters to the game that can use their unique skills to assist you in developing your cities into a thriving community.
If you want a good overview of exactly what The Helpers brings to the game, check out this official overview that breaks it down in 60 seconds:
Thankfully, we’d already known that we’d be bringing expansions to CATAN - Console Edition while we were working on the base game, so we were able to develop the game with expansion in mind. This meant that adding The Helpers was a fairly smooth experience for our team, and we were able to get it into players hands not long after launching the game.
We also released two different season content packs in 2023, with the Ice & Snow and Reap & Sow packs adding a seasonal makeover, new characters and more to the game. Just like with The Helpers expansion, we found that being able to work on smaller additional content packs like this helped us to keep the momentum going in development and get new content into peoples hands after launch without the need to wait too long.
Lessons Learned:
Following up the launch of CATAN - Console Edition with a small expansion to the game proved to be one of the best ideas we’d had in 2023, as it meant that we could keep that momentum of the launch going. In the era of live-service games, keeping people coming back with new content is more important than ever.
Knowing that we’d be working on The Helpers and our seasonal content after finishing the base game also meant that our art team could immediately begin working on them. This meant we were in a much better position to stick to our deadlines, and showed us something we already knew, but it’s always good to be reminded of - the further ahead you can plan development, the better.
The start of 2023 was marked by CATAN - Console Edition launching, and the end of 2023 was very much the same! In November, we officially launched the Nintendo Switch version of the game onto the eShop. Check out the trailer below!
With development of the Switch version taking up a large chunk of our time in 2023, looking back on the year means we’re naturally left thinking about all the time, dedication and hours we put into this port. As a studio, we’ve already launched a number of titles onto the Nintendo Switch, so we weren’t going in completely blind which helped a lot! Overall, we’re pleased with how quickly we were able to bring the game across to Switch, and with how it was received by both reviewers and players.
Also, having the game be available on every current and last-generation of games console available is a great feeling as a games studio!
We’ve been working into 2024 to bring patches and updates to this version of the game, and we’re excited to be starting the year from such a strong position when it comes to our version of CATAN.
Lessons Learned:
The Nintendo Switch port of CATAN - Console Edition is the most technically demanding game we’ve brought to the console, so we’ve learned a lot in 2023 when it comes to getting the most performance out of the Nintendo Switch.
This was also our first time working on a Nintendo Switch title where it wasn’t published directly by us - instead the lovely folk at Dovetail Games were responsible for publishing. This added something new we needed to learn and take into account, but we’re lucky to have great communication with the team over at Dovetail, so it didn’t prove to be a problem!
Both 2022 and 2023 were very successful years for our studio, and as such we’ve been expanding our team! In 2023 we welcomed Ryan, Matthew and James onto our team, and they quickly got stuck into both our current and upcoming studio projects. You can find out more about them in our introductory blog post.
Since joining the team, they’ve all settled in well and have proven to be great additions to the Nomad Games team.
Lessons Learned:
As it’s been a long while since we bought on three new people at once to the Nomad team, we had to brush up on our on-boarding processes. Not only that, but with all three new members of the team working from home, we knew it was especially important that we made them feel part of the team!
In order to make sure all three of our newest members felt like they had enough guidance with the work they were being assigned, we’ve had more meetings and catchups with them than we usually would if we were physically working together in the office still. We think this is working quite well based on the high quality of the work that all three of our new starters have done so far, so we’re going to keep it up into 2024.
We also learned that Ryan, Matthew and James are all really great to work with - but we suspected that already!
To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the original Talisman board game releasing, we put together a special physical release of Talisman: Digital Edition for some of the most popular consoles it’s available on! Launching in late 2023 as a limited release, we’ve since seen plenty of happy dice-rollers get their hands on copies of the game.
We’ve also seen a couple of copies floating around on shelves in game stores here in the UK, which always takes us by surprise.
If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, you can find out all about it in the full blog post here on our website!
Lessons Learned:
While this wasn’t our first time launching a physical release for one of our games (we’ve actually done it with the PC version of Talisman absolutely ages ago), a lot has changed since we last went through the process!
Also, due to the large number of people involved in sorting out the distribution and logistics of this physical release, lines of communication ended up getting crossed far more than they usually are. This lead to the release being delayed quite a bit and some things being pushed to the last minute. We’re still happy with the final result that you can get your hands on, but now that we understand all the steps involved, next time we make a physical release of one of our games, we’ll make sure we properly list out everything both us and our physical publisher needs much further in advance.
Talisman: Digital Edition has been around for a long while now. Not quite as long as the physical game of course, but a long while regardless! Originally launching in 2014, we decided that it was time to try something new with the game last year.
So, for an entire week we gave people the ability to pick up the game for free on mobile - no catches, no expiration dates, just allowing people to keep the game if they managed to grab it during the week we ran the promotion!
Lessons Learned:
Once the week was over, we were able to confirm that more than 50,000 of you downloaded Talisman: Digital Edition while it was available for free. That’s a lot of people rolling dice and trying not to become toads!
One of the biggest things we learned from this was that there are a ton of people out there who want to give Talisman a try, but were either put off by the initial buy-in price, or don’t know it exists unless there is a big, attention grabbing event (such as it being free for a limited time). With a game that’s been around for as many years as Talisman: Digital Edition has, it’s easy for us to forget that there’s still a lot of life left in it! Seeing the enthusiasm people had for it on mobile after grabbing it for free made us appreciate how much more we could do with Talisman, and re-evaluate our future with the game.
In 2023, we released six patches and updates for Talisman: Digital Edition, which included a whole host of bug fixes, quality of life improvements and new avatars for people to decorate their profiles with. You can check out each and every update over on the Talisman: Digital Edition news page over on Steam.
We know that each time that we roll out a new patch, we hear a ton of requests for new content to be added to Talisman: Digital Edition. If you’re one of those people who keep shouting, don’t worry - we hear you!
And while we can’t commit right now to making new Talisman stuff, we’re very much aware that the demand is here - and we hope that rolling out these updates throughout 2023 shows that we haven’t completely forgotten how much you all care about Talisman!
Lessons Learned:
Through the process of rolling out new updates for Talisman, we’re learning more about what people expect to see in patches for a game like Talisman: Digital Edition. We know you’re all keen for new content, and in order to properly set expectations for the future it’s important that we outline what ongoing support and future updates will look like. During our developer streams and in our Monthly Mailbag answers, we try our best to be as transparent as possible about the future of any of our games when we get asked about it - but more transparency before we’re asked about the state of our games is something we should strive for in 2024.
CATAN - Console Edition was the 10th game that we’d created as Nomad Games, meaning that it marked a big milestone for us! While nowadays there are a lot of different sized studios working on a wide range of differently sized games, a lot of our senior team remember the days where just getting greenlit to make a second game as a studio was something to be praised!
Lessons Learned:
As we go from 2023 into the future, we’re starting to think about what our next 10 games will be as a studio. Obviously it’s difficult to look that far ahead, but the fact we can even consider another 10 games as a possibility means we’re in a great position as a studio - which is an important thing to acknowledge and appreciate!
We took part in two major digital gaming festivals in 2023, those being the 2023 Warhammer Skulls Festival and Digital Tabletop Fest. Alongside these festivals, we also took part in the Armistice Sale to support our good friends over at War Child!
These festivals also included some awesome panels, and you can check out the Digital Tabletop Fest panel we were part of, which was very fun!
Lessons Learned:
Not only have digital games festivals been a great source of income for us in 2023 due to the sales they generate, they’ve also benefited us in other areas too! Collaborating with other studios to create panels, streams and content gives us a great way to showcase our work and build relationships with other studios.
And even though this isn’t a lesson we needed to learn, the continued charity work that we did in 2023 makes us even more confident that in 2024 we’ll continue to support causes like SpecialEffect and War Child.
All the way back in September 2022, we launched our first ever board game companion app, for the Ready Set Bet board game. Since launching it, we’ve been adding a series of small updates to the game that focus on ironing out the small handful of bugs that cropped up post-launch, and adding a whole heap of new languages to the app too.
As the physical game has gained popularity in different countries across the world, we’ve been trying our best to match the languages available to those locations. In 2023, we added support for German, Korean, Hungarian, Spanish and Greek. Based on the information the different app stores give us about where people are playing, it looks like these extra languages are being appreciated just as we hoped they would be!
Lessons Learned:
2023 was our first year spent supporting an official companion app, and taking on that task came with many important lessons for us. Firstly, we needed to completely rethink how we decide what languages we implement compared to our other titles - the plans that AEG had for where they were physically releasing the game had to be taken into account.
Something else we learned in 2023 from working on Ready Set Bet is the ways that different storefronts handle content that is associated with gambling! Turns out, there are a lot of different rules and regulations you need to conform to when your app has ‘bet’ in the name and is themed around horse racing. And while we’re not planning on getting into the gambling industry anytime soon, seeing and learning about all these different restrictions gave us some great insight into the amount of steps other companies need to go through!
For anyone who doesn’t know, we’re a remote working studio here at Nomad, which means that by default we all work from home! And while this has worked great for us, we’re still very much aware of the benefits that come from actually being able to see each other in person.
With that in mind, we organised two separate get togethers for the Nomad team in 2023, both at the awesome Fanboy 3 in Manchester! As most of us are based within travelling-distance of Manchester, it makes for a good location for us all to get together, play some games and confirm that we all still exist in real life.
It also helps that Manchester is full of places that do great food, so we can all go and grab a meal afterwards!
Lessons Learned:
If we’re going to get the whole team together, getting together somewhere with good food to eat is a high priority! On a more serious note, we’ve massively seen the benefit that even just the occasional meetup brings to the team - with us all spread out and working from home, putting in the effort to celebrate milestones by going out for a meal or meeting up is more important than ever.
As anyone who regularly reads our monthly studio round-ups will be aware, we’ve been working very hard on super secret projects for most of 2023.
And while we didn’t get a chance to tell you what that secret project was in 2023, we’re still mighty pleased with the progress we’ve made and the amount we’ve been able to accomplish behind the scenes. This is more of a setup for 2024, so we massively appreciate your patience as you wait for us to finally, finally unveil what we’ve been working on.
Lessons Learned:
We’ve spent a lot of 2023 talking about how much we’ve been working behind the scenes on the upcoming projects, without anything to really show for it! And while we know that you’re all very patient and understanding when it comes to how long game development takes, but looking back, we could have shared more information earlier to give you all a better idea of what we’re doing.
The good news is that 2024 is the year we finally reveal what we’ve been working on, so we’re hoping that all that all the patience and anticipation pays off!
That’s the end of our 2023 retrospective! Thanks for supporting us through another year of game development, and make sure you follow us on all the cool social media platforms to keep up with our latest news!