Amid the doom and gloom in the games industry right now—the mass layoffs, the studio closures, the declarations that TikTok is winning the attention war—there are still little studios plugging away at good, niche games and making it work. Mohawk Games, founded in 2013 by ex-Firaxis developers, is one of them.
Mohawk is about to release new DLC for its excellent 2021 grand strategy game, Old World, and studio co-founder Soren Johnson told me at GDC earlier this month that revenue from the game is enough to sustain the company, which has purposefully remained small at 15 people.
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In its 13 years, Mohawk has so far released two games—”economic RTS” Offworld Trading Company and Old World—as well as lots of DLC for both. The latest Old World expansion, Empires of the Indus, takes the grand strategy game to the Indian subcontinent, adding three new civilizations. It’s out on March 30.
Old World is very much in Johnson’s wheelhouse—he led the design of Civilization 4—but he does have ideas outside of the grand strategy genre, telling me he’s “often wanted to make some sort of light, tactical RPG type game” and is interested in narrative games like Inkle’s 80 Days. There’s nothing to announce right now, but Johnson says he’s got “a giant list of games it’d be fun to make.”