Independent studio Torpor Games today announced the closing of a minority seed investment round with participation from Krafton, 1Up Ventures, and Sisu Game Ventures.
Torpor Games is the studio behind Suzerain, a political strategy RPG experience that has grown into a cross-platform success and the foundation of the expanding Suzerain Universe IP. Over the past 2.5 years, Suzerain has evolved with new content, a full-scale DLC, and strong community engagement that continues to fuel the growth of the universe.
Unlike many games that shun controversy, Suzerain was full of politics. It didn’t run away from such topics, and it turned out to be very popular with 1.4 million users.
This investment enables the full production of Torpor’s next flagship title, The Conformist, and supports further expansion of the Suzerain Universe through new DLCs for Suzerain, including Project Aperture and Project Vanguard, as well as Project Fulcrum, a new standalone game set in the same universe.
“Our excitement is high, the path ahead is before us, and the team is ready. We are setting out to spread the Torpor message to gamers everywhere and to the wider world,” said Ata Sergey Nowak, managing director of Torpor Games, in a statement. “Our new partners believe very strongly in our vision to build a multi-game and multimedia IP with craftsmanship, innovative creativity, and contemplative social impact at its core. This investment provides us with the capacity to deliver larger and more ambitious political experiences while retaining the creative and operational independence that define our studio.”
Why make political games?
Nowak said he was always drawn to strategy games. He worked at Paradox Interactive on a couple of games but he wanted to see more political nuance in games.
“I felt like there was a lack of human and emotional-centric storytelling that is at the core of politics and societal topics. I saw a lot of games about logic levers and values, which I didn’t think reflected society well and the complexity of human beings,” Nowak said. “Because if everything was a math problem, I think we would have solved politics a long time ago. There came the idea of Suzerain, our first game at Torpor Games.”
Nowak said he wanted to actually create empathy for politicians and switch the perspective of people so they get to rule and actually get to experience the challenges and everything from a role-playing perspective, the more expressionistic way.
Origins
“That’s where the Suzerain concept came from. It was also, of course, inspired by the time of change. At the time 2016 Trump got elected, the world felt like it was shifting. So I felt like it was a great time to talk about all this,” Nowak said. “I banded together my high school friends.”
He told his cofounders about this cool idea, and asked them to help make it with him. The team came together in 2019 when Nowak signed with Fellow Traveler as the publisher. The game debut in 2020 and it got great reviews.
“Initially, we had a lot of resistance against the full-on political game that actually goes all in on these subjects,” Nowak said. “A lot of people said it won’t sell. It’s just too difficult. It’s too challenging. But then we landed well. So after that, we grew the company. We released a massive plea update. We did porting, we did the massive DLC that’s paid on top. And in total, we reached 1.4 million players.”
Krafton investment director Mike Hong said in a statement, “Suzerain has one of the most dedicated and loyal fanbases we’ve seen. It’s the kind of community where some fans will create localizations for their own countries purely out of love for the game. It’s a testament to how community-driven the Torpor team is, making evolving games with their players in mind. We believe this strength will carry the studio and its IP to even greater heights.”
“And Ata is one of the most knowledgeable people in the industry when it comes to politics. Torpor is the only studio directly tackling modern and contemporary political themes, which require elegant design to handle such a sensitive subject. While this theme has already proven successful in other forms of media, it hasn’t yet been fully realized in games. If there’s one team that can truly grow this niche, we believe it’s Torpor.”
Ed Fries, general partner at 1Up Ventures, said in a statement, “We’ve seen Torpor Games grow with steady focus and creativity. Their bold plans to expand their universe with innovative experiences make them an exciting part of the 1Up community, and we’re ready to support them on that path.”
Legal guidance for the deal came from Igor Rudolph of Brehm v. Moers and Norton Rose.
Jere Partanen, principal at Sisu Game Ventures, said in a statement, “Ata, İlke, and Özgün’s decades-long friendship and nuanced perspective on political life are at the core of Torpor’s strength. Suzerain manages to be thought-provoking and weighty while offering impactful choices, authentic portrayals of political actors, and moments of humanity and levity. The care they’ve put into the Suzerain IP is most visible in its uniquely engaged and appreciative community, and it’s hard to imagine a stronger foundation for shaping the future of political games.”
Torpor Games remains fully at the helm. Day-to-day operations continue unchanged, with the added strength of new partners to help scale the studio’s vision and bring daring political experiences to players worldwide in a more sustainable way for the studio.
A special thank you goes to John Graham, cofounder of Humble Bundle and founder of Elbow Grease Games, one of Torpor’s pre-seed investors who played a key role in facilitating this round. Torpor was also one of only ten studios selected for the inaugural cohort of Elbow Grease Games’ accelerator program, which helped the team build strong momentum leading into this funding round.
Headquartered in Berlin, Torpor Games is an indie studio focused on producing political experiences that explore society and the human condition. The studio is best known for Suzerain and its Kingdom of Rizia expansion.
Its work has been recognized with a number of awards, including Best in Civics at the 2025 Games for Change Awards. Torpor Games continues to expand the Suzerain Universe while developing new projects such as The Conformist, creating experiences that challenge and provoke players to reflect on politics, power, and agency.
Coming soon
For the next game, there are some code names but Nowak isn’t saying much about it, except that it has a 1950s timeline with a different twist.
“The entire IP that we’ve built was to make sure that the politics and the choices and the logic of the game universe makes sense,” he said. “Everything we’re building is within the same IP. So we are like a single IP company that builds multiple experiences within the IP,” Nowak said.
As for the game, Nowak said, “We’re just jumping around the universe much quicker and exploring different things.”
Next year, the company is releasing two experiences, with details to be realeased later. And after that, the company will have a larger country-focused game.
In The Conformist, it takes place 20 years before Suzerain in the capital of the same country, where you will try to win multi-party elections. It’s about the birth of democracy in the country.
“It’s a very human story. We have a family to take care of. We’re not that rich. We start at a very low rank, and then as the story goes, we rise up. It’s has a lot of choices,” Nowak said. “It’s about bottom-up change.”
While it is set in a fictional country, Nowak said the political themes are contemporary. The cultures and countries are different, like mashups.
“We’re not like a fantasy political game,” he said. “We want to stay close. We’re not like today, but we’re adjacent to today. The game is set in the 1930s, like in the 1930s in Berlin, which was a time of political turmoil.
“We want to stay relevant, and we want to highlight the origins of the political movements that shape today,” Nowak said.
Choosing different roles
In Suzerain, you can pick different leadership roles. You can be a communist, you can be like capitalist, you can be democratic centrist. You can be a mixture of a lot of things.
“Our players were very confident in our ability to deliver nuanced political expression,” he said. “This is how you manipulate people. This is how you get manipulated. This is what they’re doing to us.”
Again, Nowak isn’t running from politics.
“I guess it’s like a counter wave. We are saying that everything is political. Our statement is that even being apolitical is a political act,” he said. “What triple-A games do is they’re aesthetically political. They use politics as an aesthetic. But content wise, they’re not. It’s like a facade. Western games paint a face where the Russians or Arabs are enemies.
I pointed out that many big companies felt that if the political divides were 50-50, and the game took one side over another’s, then the companies would conclude that half the people would hate the game and they would lose sales.
“The challenge that a lot of other games face is they have a very linear story, which automatically forces you to a more singular perspective, because you don’t have agency,” Nowak said. “One of the reasons why we focus on expression and choice is because the only way to do politics and games in a nuanced and actually caring way is to give all the options that you can because that forces you to explore consequences, which then forces you to have a nuanced debate,” Nowak said. “We call it multi-perspective political entertainment.”
Not much pushback
The game did well in countries such as South Korea, Japan, China, and the US. India and Indonesia have been surprisingly strong.
While publishers are fearful of angering fans with political games, Nowak said there was very little pushback from people who may have felt it was overly political. If there were complaints, it was that the game wasn’t in their language, which is kind of a positive comment as they wanted to play it. There were some Republicans from the U.S. who felt like anything that wasn’t capitalistic was by definition communism, with no realization that it was more like a nationalistic economic policy, Nowak said. Some were upset that the game mentioned women’s rights, advocated by women characters in the game. But such negative comments were in perhaps 1% of the reviews.
While the game has a lot of text, fans still embraced it. Once they got into it, they saw there was more humanity and emotion than in many strategy games, Nowak said. Now there are some Suzerain-likes appearing in the market with a focus on strategy and politics.
The Conformist is not destined for mobile. It’s a PC and console game. But some of the other projects will have mobile a version.
As for other Berlin game companies, Berlin is starting to thrive. There are 310 game companies in the city, but Nowak believes a lot of indies have shut down. Perhaps some of those failed to adapt to the new industry situation.
“It’s been a rough wake-up call for the local Indies,” he said. “We need to rethink and rebuild.”
Fortunately, Torpor Games has been hiring. The government grants are good in Germany as the government match 45% of your own funding. The city has some homegrown talent, but there are also game developers in Berlin from all over the world, Nowak said.
With government support available, Nowak believes most of the company’s new hires will be in Berlin.