Firesquid 2022 retrospective

This article is a recap of what happened in 2022 for us at Firesquid, a young publisher of strategy games.

We are an indie publisher focusing on games that include strategizing and thinking. Whether it is a grand strategy game, a city-builder, or any other game where the brain is the most important muscle. Our goal is to empower diverse teams and offer players games that make their eyes shine. Meet our team!

Submit your games and read about our exciting year!

What happened in 2022?

We started the year with the announcement of our first game Great Houses of Calderia, a modern generational Grand Strategy game set in the fantastic land of Calderia inspired by the Renaissance.

We received a warm welcome from the strategy game community, especially on Twitter. Players seemed to be intrigued by the Crusader Kings III and Game of Thrones mix and joined our Discord server. We organized a few playtest sessions with our community in the following months. Players shared insightful feedback and we carefully listened.

In June, the game was selected and showcased at the PC Gaming Show in front of thousands of viewers with an exclusive gameplay trailer.

The day after was the beginning of the Steam Next Fest, where the game was showcased. We shared a new demo and had two live streams by the developers at Resistance Games. The reception was good and gained us thousands of wishlists.

In the Summer, Léa and Igor joined us as game testers for an internship where they could learn QA testing, and work on all our games. Thanks to their hard work and passion, they helped the teams tremendously.

At the same time, we were working on another big project: TactiCon. TactiCon is a love letter to strategy games of all kinds. With our partners Hooded Horse, we wanted to celebrate this genre that’s so close to our hearts.

TactiCon is a five-day Steam festival showcasing a carefully curated list of exciting upcoming and recently released or updated strategy and tactics games across a number of different subgenres (grand strategy, 4X, RTS, turn-based tactics, and similar). It also features a series of unique talks, panels, interviews, and let’s plays given by experts from the genre in addition to showcasing the games themselves in a dedicated sale. The event is covered by streamers and the media alike and hosted as a weekend sale on Steam.

TactiCon Trailer on Twitter:

In total, 116 games were featured with 58 games on sale and 48 demos. Two dozen speakers took part in 9 panels around strategy games, with the videos available on Youtube. The event Steam page received +2.1M unique impressions, +1.5M unique visitors and a significant wishlists (among 62 respondents) and sales boost for the games participating.

In parallel, to take advantage of the TactiCon momentum, we announced our second game, USC: Counterforce.  USC is a turn-based squad tactics game inspired by XCOM, Space Hulk, and Aliens, featuring in-depth skill & combat systems and multiple game modes. The game invites you to discover the truth behind the demise of colony MC83-A, and to protect Humankind from an ancient alien threat.

We ran a first playtest session on the demo and new tutorial that was really promising. The developers, Angry Cat Studios, and Firesquid are eager to add new features and modes to the game. The community members will be able to test new exciting features in advance of its release.

We then prepared for December’s TurnBasedFest, a Steam strategy game event created by the turn-based community. USC: Counterforce participated with a demo including a new tutorial, new missions, and major visual changes.

We’ve been attending many events in 2022: Game Camp (Lille), Gamescom (Cologne), EGX Live (London), Game Connection (Paris). We plan of going to a few more in 2023, starting with the Game Developer Conference in March (San Francisco). We’d love to meet you there and listen to your pitch!

2023 is going to be very promising for us as a publisher. We will release our first games Great Houses of Calderia and USC: Counterforce, announce new partnerships, hopefully, have a second edition of TactiCon, and more!

We’d love to hear about your game! Submit it now