Torpor Games is a games company founded in Berlin in 2019. Torpor Games creates thought-provoking entertainment in all forms to expand horizons, shift perspectives and challenge morality in all facets of the human experience.
Combining a wide variety of disciplines and experience, the team is working on the critically acclaimed, community-boosted, and financially successful Suzerain, and upcoming The Conformist set in the same fictional universe.
Torpor Games is an EIT Culture and Creativity Community partner.
On the EIT Culture and Creativity blog series – Industry Thought Leaders in Europe, here are our 5 questions and the 5 answers from Ata Nowak:
1. What is your company’s strategy to navigate the multiple crises currently afflicting Europe? How is your company leveraging innovation to do so?
Our strategy in these turbulent times focuses on bolstering autonomy and market independence. This involves consolidating around a core of key creators online and offline, diversifying talent, ensuring cultural and mental breadth. While physical issues like hardware shortages or war minimally impact us in the gaming industry due to the digital environment, inflation poses a significant challenge for our employees. We’ve responded by strategically reducing office and food costs, effectively offsetting inflationary pressures. This approach maintains our agility and positions us to adapt swiftly to market changes, ensuring we continue delivering innovative gaming experiences despite economic fluctuations.
2. How do you invest in innovation? (e.g. in incremental steps close to markets, in disruptive innovation with long term returns, or a mixture?) Are you investing more or less than before?
We’ve intensified our commitment to research and development, more than ever before, amidst the market’s dynamic technological shifts. Notably, AI’s profound impact has led us to explore its potential in augmenting our creators’ capabilities, envisioning it as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement. We have some non-native English contributors, volunteers, and people with disorders who use AI to help them output better and ease their life as creators. This emphasis on using what helps our team is crucial for smaller studios like ours, enabling us to bridge production and resource gaps and remain competitive in the marketplace. We also see strong potential in AR for immersive storytelling, as our main focus remains on making players feel impacted by our universe, and its political and emotional experiences.
3. What is your outlook for the future of your market next year, and in 5 years?
looking ahead, the gaming industry, having weathered a tough 15 months due to investment declines and the post-COVID downturn, shows promising signs of rejuvenation in 2025 and beyond. There’s an increasing demand for unique IPs and diverse, high-quality gaming experiences that upset existing formulas. We see significant opportunities in specializing and deepening our focus of multi-perspective political entertainment, rather than pursuing broad market appeal. Innovation remains a cornerstone; while the industry standardizes on safe, revenue-generating products, we believe that well-executed innovation offers substantial rewards, outstripping the risks associated with novel ventures.
4. Which policy agendas and legal frameworks would support your global competitiveness?
Navigating the European policy landscape, we’ve encountered significant challenges, particularly with Creative Europe’s eligibility criteria for non-European tax residents. This has closed opportunities due to the international background of the founder team. Streamlining and relaxing these processes is imperative, as bureaucratic complexities divert critical resources from SMEs’ product development and a lack of openness in EU grants leads to slowed growth. Europe’s strength lies in its arts and culture; however, its competitive edge risks erosion without aggressive investment in new technologies and innovations. The arts are Europe’s unique selling point, but overlooking sectors like AI could undermine the high living standards we’ve achieved as the continent sees impacts of deindustrialization.
5. What resource would most help your company to reach its financial or other performance targets next year, and/or in 5 years?
A key hurdle in the gaming industry is the dearth of venture capital funding for non-mobile games. This gap hampers the potential of many talented studios to compete on an international scale with more capital deployment capabilities. Moreover, the absence of European competitors in gaming platforms further complicates matters, with substantial revenue cuts flowing overseas. Developing European technological platforms could accelerate growth, enhance wealth distribution, and fortify the European Games industry’s international standing. This shift could be massive for our company to reach its financial and performance targets in the future, allowing us to hire more, better, and create more games.
About EIT Culture & Creativity
EIT Culture & Creativity is the ninth Innovation Community by the European Institute of Innovation and Technfology (EIT), a body of the European Union. It is designed to strengthen and transform Europe’s Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI) by connecting creatives and organisations to Europe’s largest innovation network. It takes a holistic and open approach to innovation – from tech to artistic driven innovations, from business to citizen driven – and reinforces the appreciation and anchoring of European values and identities. EIT Culture & Creativity will unlock latent value from a multitude of small CCSI stakeholders through technology transfer, improved cross-sectoral collaboration and their effective integration in production value networks. EIT Culture & Creativity will support technology and business innovation; artistic innovation and social innovation. It will also harness the unique position of the CCSI to facilitate the Triple Transitions in Europe – green, digital and social.
About The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT)
The EIT is Europe’s largest innovation ecosystem bringing together close to 3,000 partners from top business, research and education organisations across Europe in over 80 innovation hubs. The EIT strengthens Europe’s ability to innovate by powering solutions to pressing global challenges and by nurturing entrepreneurial talent to create sustainable growth and skilled jobs in Europe. The EIT is an EU body and an integral part of Horizon Europe, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The Institute supports dynamic pan-European partnerships, EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities, composed of leading companies, research labs and universities each dedicated to solving a pressing global challenge, from climate change to health, to renewable energy.
