"Developers' interest in working with funds has increased," says Anton Mikhailov from Tortuga Team on the results of 2025

We continue to wrap up the year 2025 with gaming teams. Today, we present an interview with Anton Mikhailov, the creative director of the indie studio Tortuga Team, known for the turn-based strategy series Braveland.

What kind of year was 2025 for your team? What were you able to accomplish, and what didn't you manage to achieve?

We released Spaceland using the Try and Buy model on mobile devices. Overall, this model turned out to be quite questionable and only truly justified itself on the App Store.

Spaceland

We're also continuing to develop our turn-based tactical RPG Sand Nomads. We planned to release a demo this fall, but it’s been postponed to 2026.

Sand Nomads

What conclusions did your development studio draw from 2025?

We continue to maintain two directions — a free-to-play model with our Braveland Heroes and a pay model with cross-platform games for Steam and consoles. Based on the 2025 results, we see this as the optimal combination for our creative goals and skill sets.

Braveland Heroes

Have there been any changes in the way you interact with publishers or investors?

We sense that developers have increased interest in working with funds. Many are cautious, including us. Yet, some are finding funding there, including from publishers.

What kind of year was it for the niche in which you operate?

The market continues to be saturated with projects. New successful titles in the turn-based tactics genre are regularly released and generally move in two main directions. There’s either more "story-driven" content or more complex mechanics. Both niches seem to be in demand at the moment, but this means project budgets and complexity in this niche are growing.

What trends in your niche do you anticipate in 2026?

AI is increasingly entering development. Coding, text, art, promotional materials. However, we haven’t yet reached a flood of generated games. It seems this is still ahead of us, which will shift platform focus even more towards successful games, leaving more projects behind.

What are the team's plans for the coming year?

Besides working on Sand Nomads, we have ideas for our free-to-play direction. We don’t want to dive into the "hyper-casual" genre as it’s not our profile. However, there are ideas for some experiments in other genres.