Founded 21 years ago, the studio from Barcelona, Spain was specially known for their period where they were a Sony 2nd party studio making games mostly for PSP, but also PS Vita and PS3 of the innovative series Invizimals, which was like an evolved AR game predecessor of Pokemon Go. The series became a big hit in the south of Europe, later expanding to animation tv show, animation movie, trading card games, comics, toys and tons of other merchandise.
As the market shifted from portables to mobile and the Sony support to PS Vita decreased, Novarama tried to bring Invizimals to mobile and became independent trying to unsuccessfully make their own mobile games. Later they did work on the mobile version of the Samurai Jack game and shifted to a more ambitious Helldivers 1+Diablo+Destiny like AA GaaS title for PC that was planned to be brought later to consoles: Killsquad. Was a good game, didn't have a great success, but got the attention from Tencent, who invested on them.
After it they recently released United 1944, an interesting WWII team based MP shooter with real time strategy elements where you craft trenches and protection and with a meaningful day and night cycle (vision/light and sound affects gameplay). Again, the game didn't work. They tried to save the studio selling it to someone but couldn't so they are filling for bankrupcy.
Novarama is a beloved studio in the Spanish gaming industry because was one of the first ones with international success on console after Bit Managers, Ubisoft Barcelona or Virtual Toys, because of their innovation achievement and because many talent from their studio later did a great job in many top studios like Rockstar, CD Projekt, IOI, Epic or Naughty Dog just to name a few, plus countless Spanish studios both from local companies or from local studios of big companies such as Ubisoft, King, Gameloft, IOI, Activision Blizzard, Take 2 and more. The core team of the studio also did run a Master in a local University which back in the day was the first one about gamedev in Spain, and also has been a source of a ton of local gamedev talent.
After becoming a local Twitter microinfluencer, Novarama's CEO recently did open a youtube channel (some videos are in English, other ones in Spanish), and today postetd a video talking about the studio closure. In Spanish, but he may do an English version soon:
As the market shifted from portables to mobile and the Sony support to PS Vita decreased, Novarama tried to bring Invizimals to mobile and became independent trying to unsuccessfully make their own mobile games. Later they did work on the mobile version of the Samurai Jack game and shifted to a more ambitious Helldivers 1+Diablo+Destiny like AA GaaS title for PC that was planned to be brought later to consoles: Killsquad. Was a good game, didn't have a great success, but got the attention from Tencent, who invested on them.
After it they recently released United 1944, an interesting WWII team based MP shooter with real time strategy elements where you craft trenches and protection and with a meaningful day and night cycle (vision/light and sound affects gameplay). Again, the game didn't work. They tried to save the studio selling it to someone but couldn't so they are filling for bankrupcy.
Novarama is a beloved studio in the Spanish gaming industry because was one of the first ones with international success on console after Bit Managers, Ubisoft Barcelona or Virtual Toys, because of their innovation achievement and because many talent from their studio later did a great job in many top studios like Rockstar, CD Projekt, IOI, Epic or Naughty Dog just to name a few, plus countless Spanish studios both from local companies or from local studios of big companies such as Ubisoft, King, Gameloft, IOI, Activision Blizzard, Take 2 and more. The core team of the studio also did run a Master in a local University which back in the day was the first one about gamedev in Spain, and also has been a source of a ton of local gamedev talent.
After becoming a local Twitter microinfluencer, Novarama's CEO recently did open a youtube channel (some videos are in English, other ones in Spanish), and today postetd a video talking about the studio closure. In Spanish, but he may do an English version soon:
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