3rd April 2023
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - MARCH 2023 EDITION
Hello everyone!
March has come and gone in a flash it seems, and we’ve been mighty busy the whole time! Following on from Dovetail Games launching CATAN® - Console Edition right at the end of February, we’ve been busy implementing community requests, rolling out patches for the game and generally doing our best to make sure the game is the best it can be!
We’ve also had a lot of interviews with potential new hires over the past few months, and we’re excited to be bringing on more people to the Nomad Games team mighty soon. We’ll talk more about them after they’ve joined and settled in a bit!
But enough about what we’re going to be doing, it’s time to dive into… what we’ve been doing!
As you’ll hopefully know by now (and if not, you’ve somehow managed to miss our marketing bombardment), CATAN® - Console Edition launched on February 28th. That meant that from March 1st onwards, the feedback on the game was coming through thick and fast across all the different social channels where people could share their thoughts! Check out the official Accolades trailer below to see what some people have been saying:
Even after launch, the teams both here at Nomad and over at Dovetail have not slowed down when it comes to working on the game. Throughout all of March, we’ve been fixing bugs, working on new features (like the much-requested turn timer) and more.
All of this work is what the majority of our March was spent doing, alongside rolling out patches with the fixes, updates and improvements we made.
In March, CATAN - Console Edition also got two patches that addresses a number of issues and improved the game for you all.
The first patch was released on March 2nd, and you can read the full patch notes here. The second patch came out on March 10th, and also has a fully detailed list of patch notes which you can find here.
Thanks to the success of CATAN - Console Edition (and all the support that you’ve given us over the last few years), we’ve been looking to the future of Nomad and what our goals are in 2023 and beyond.
In order to reach those goals, we realised we were going to need a bigger team! As such, we offered roles to a number of successful individuals that we’d interviewed in the past few months. At the start of April, we’re going to have 3 new developers joining our team, which is mighty exciting!
We’ll share more information about them once they’ve had a chance to settle in, but we’re extremely excited about what these new additions mean for us here at Nomad.
Last month, we talked a little bit about all the secret things we were getting up to that we couldn’t quite talk about yet. Well, we’re back again to tell you (as much as we can) about the fun stuff we’re doing that we can’t tell you about!
In March, we continued pitching cool ideas to people who were excited to listen to those cool ideas! Our art teams have also been hard at work on some great proof of concept work that shows off the cool things we’d be able to do with the projects we’re hoping to work on in the future.
Near the end of March, the Digital Tabletop Fest returned for the 3rd time to Steam! It might be over now, but you can still check out all the different games that were featured over on Steam.
Our very own Tom Young also took part in one of the panels - which you can watch below:
In March, we graced your internet pipes with two different developer streams! With streams of both Talisman: Digital Edition and Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition it was a great month for people who like watching our very own Tom Young be bad at video games.
Normally, we’d share our stream schedule for the coming month here - but we’re having a bit of a change here at Nomad! It’s nothing too dramatic, but after roughly a year of weekly streaming over on our Twitch channel, we finally sat down and had a look at the cold, hard numbers behind the performance of our channel.
After a fair amount of internal debate, we came to the conclusion that although we’re very much enjoying doing our weekly streams, they weren’t serving their purpose as well as they could be. Once you factor in how many people were watching each stream we did, we realised that the amount of effort we were putting in to stream each week wasn’t paying off. For us as a games studio, streaming has to do two different things:
Allow us to engage with our community
Show off our games to encourage people to buy them
While this was being achieved, our number of viewers wasn’t increasing week by week. Originally, we thought that by sticking to a set schedule, we’d be able to develop more of a regular audience - sadly this doesn’t seem to have happened.
This isn’t to say that our game developer streams are going away! Far from it - we want to keep bringing you developer streams, but we’re going to be smarter about it. Instead of dedicating ourselves to a weekly schedule, we’re going to put more effort into streaming for special events. For example, our March streams coincided with both the Steam Spring Sale and Digital Tabletop Fest. During these events, more eyeballs are on us anyway, and by streaming we can capitalise on that extra attention.
We got a single question into the mailbag during March, but we’re going to do our best to answer it regardless!
From Greg
“Hi! Any chance of seeing a digital version of Starfarers of Catan, down the road? A console or iPad version would be great!
A great question! There’s quite a lot of differences between the base version of CATAN and Starfarers, so we’d need to develop a lot of the game from the ground up. Ultimately, the following combination of things would have to come together:
Dovetail want to make Starfarers of Catan digitally.
CATAN Studio want to make a digital version of Starfarers.
We can see that there is enough of an audience there for the game to justify making it.
Not only do those things need to happen, but our teams here at Nomad and at Dovetail also need to have the free time to dedicate towards making it! Hopefully that answers your question (or at least gives you some insight) into the chances of seeing a digital version of Starfarers.
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk. We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird!
If you’d like to follow us, keep up to date with us and generally just see all the cool things we do, you can find all our social links, games and more over on our Linktree - how handy!