Novarama, one of the oldest video game development studios in Spain, has announced that it is closing its doors. The Barcelona company founded in 2003 and creator of the successful InviZimals franchise has entered bankruptcy as a result of its poor economic results in recent years. This is one more victim of the crisis that the electronic entertainment sector is currently experiencing.
Approximately a month ago, the general director of the studio, Daniel Sánchez-Crespo, announced a staff reduction through a message on LinkedIn, but it was not until this week that the Barcelona Commercial Court number 11 declared the insolvency procedure business.
“We have been fighting a tremendous battle over the past eight months, but the enemies we were facing are not made of pixels. They are made of much more tangible and threatening things, such as a huge crisis in our sector,” the company's head announced through a video.
The news comes two years after Novarama announced the entry of the Chinese entertainment giant Tencent into its shareholding. Although at that time the figures of the agreement were not detailed, Crónica Global revealed this week that the operation meant the entry of 5.4 million euros, a capital injection that the company took advantage of to grow, expand the workforce to around seventy workers and start working on what has been their latest game, the multiplayer title United 1944.
Available in early access since the end of last year, this video game set in World War II has failed to arouse the necessary interest from players. Its original combination of action and strategy elements has earned it mostly positive reviews on the computer gaming platform Steam, but it has not reached a minimum user base to be viable.
Among other reasons, Sánchez-Crespo attributes the failure of United 1944 to the saturation that the video game market has experienced since the end of the pandemic. “We weren't aware that this same growth path that we had chosen for ourselves had also been chosen by many other companies, and that many other studios also thought they could make those types of multiplayer games,” he said.
In his statement, the general director of Novarama states that efforts have been made to keep the company afloat until the last moment, but that it has not been possible. The creative maintains that right now the company's top priority is to try to ensure that the team members quickly find new jobs in other video game studios.
Novarama began its journey in 2003 with the help of its founders Juan Luís Abadía, Alberto Díaz, Rubén López, Marc de Miquel and Daniel Sánchez-Crespo. The company opened its doors at a time when mobile games were booming, something that coincided with the opening of various studios dedicated to them in Barcelona. However, Novarama decided to focus on console and computer games.
Its most successful title was the aforementioned InviZimals (2009), a game of capturing and fighting fantastic creatures in the Pokémon style that surprised with its innovative use of augmented reality technology. Designed for the PlayStation Portable (PSP), it became a great bet for Sony for this portable console and became a transmedia franchise with different installments and even a television series. Other titles from the company were Reality Fighters, Space Legend or the most recent KillSquad.
The video game sector is currently going through a major crisis internationally. The aforementioned market saturation, caused by a large supply of games, is one of the causes, but there is more. We must also add the decreasing purchasing power of the players, the ability of the big titles (Fortnite, PUBG) to retain users and the erratic planning of many companies during the pandemic period – in which the consumption of video game-.
This 2024, the video game industry will already accumulate more than 8,000 layoffs and dozens of studio closures, although the most notable cases have been those of the video game divisions of Microsoft and Sony, which have laid off 1,900 and 900 so far this year. workers, respectively.
