Finland focus: Sauma Technologies

Sauma Technologies

Location: Helsinki
Headcount: 20
IPs: Hours of War
Specialty: Strategy MMOs

Visiting Sauma’s modern office in Helsinki, you’re greeted by shelves piled high with military board games, WWII model kits, tomes listing statistics of army vehicles and pencil sketches of weapon-clad men in uniform.

It’s clear that the team is working on a fairly hardcore strategy game, but Sauma is also responsible for Stream Garden – a casual game based around creating flowers.

“You could say we’re a little schizophrenic,” jokes the studio’s producer Miikka Lyytikainen, but there is currently a clear focus throughout the team on Hours of War.

The game itself is an in-depth and rather complex looking combination of MMO, social network, turn-based strategy title and cross platform rich-media experience. Players can involve themselves at various levels of the battle, and ultimately the studio hopes to cater for both browser users and those with mobile phones.

Despite the game’s conventional theme, Sauma CEO Andreas von Koskull is confident his team are creating something fresh: “The game business is certainly a creative space, but increasingly there is little innovation, which we wanted to move away from.”

“Poor cross-platform mobile gaming and static browser-based strategy games are all too common, and we felt it’s time for a change. We’re proud to have secured funding for our game at the beginning of the year, and we’re looking at building two more related IPs on our platform.”

www.saumatechnologies.com