“Conflict of Nations is as multi-platform as any other website, and that has been a challenging but instrumental factor of its success”

The browser-based games market is heating up and is set to be one of 2025's big industry trends.

One company already in on the space is Dorado Games, which launched Conflict of Nations in 2017 on web — and later on Steam, the App Store and Google Play — and attributes much of its success to being available across platforms.

We spoke with the studio's head of product Oliver Kutnik to discuss the title's long journey, how it has steadily grown its player base, and what to expect in the future.

Discover more about multi-platform development and browser gaming on our Browser Breakthroughs track at Pocket Gamer Connects London on January 20th to 21st.

PocketGamer.biz: First, can you tell us how 2024 has been for the studio and Conflict of Nations: World War 3? 

Oliver Kutnik: Better than ever! It’s been an exciting ramp-up for the game and studio this year. On the studio side, the teams have taken on such an inspirational transformation in our evolving pursuit of excellence.

It is a very rare opportunity to be part of a bandit group of colleagues so determined and believing in our future potential. And it’s showing internally, with the constant re-evaluation of processes, willingly moving our own goalposts forward, and being excited at how much-untapped potential we still have within ourselves.

We’ve also been able to capture a few more insanely talented team members along the way. We are humbled that we continuously find such top-tier individuals who share our ambition and have a similar immeasurable passion for our product to any of us who have dedicated ten solid years to developing Conflict of Nations.

The game consistently exceeds our expectations. Over the past years, we’ve refined and expanded gameplay depth in an intriguingly complex online strategy game, but this year, we’ve added a few fan-favourite bells and whistles, like managing online friends and more.

Much of what makes Conflict of Nations so exciting to come back to is the variety of content it offers, and this year has already seen a buzzing excitement of new Seasonal game content with introductions of tactically interesting units, new maps, winning conditions, play styles and so much more. The team is really committed to providing exciting content on a regular rhythm, and from here on out, each new Season promises to be more unique. 

Our biggest undertaking this year has to be the foundational efforts to reinvent and modernise our game client, which will deliver improved performance, improved UI, a nicer look, and the use of the latest technologies. It’s still behind closed curtains for now, but we are ecstatic to share that soon, our decade-long desktop client will get a breath of fresh air, along with a sleeker and more usable mobile client.

You mentioned new additions to the team. How many developers are working on the game, and how do you plan to continue adding new content and updates?

Our strongly bonded team and studio have incredible people retention, so nearly all of our original members are still fully committed to working directly on the game. We’ve only been adding less than a handful of new colleagues each year, so we definitely believe that with a small and agile team of about 20 production crew members working directly on the game, we are hitting high above our own weight.

Another roughly 30 internal team members fulfill supporting and publishing roles that also propel much of our momentum to be able to compete in top tier market categories against top-ranked games with far bigger team sizes.

Content is one of the keystones that has propelled Conflict of Nations up over many years; a rather strong, unique selling point of the game is the near-endless way of empowering strategic choices.

Our strategy has always been, and is still, a strong focus for us to empower our community and the many players with strategic gameplay variety. Typical Seasons in the game consist of new gameplay content that, in a similar fashion to most online team-based competitive games, change the meta balance of strategy and tactics.

Add to that additional unique map scenarios and historic real-world or what-if scenarios, resulting in fun-focused content that keeps our community engaged and continuously in conversation with us. 

Each one of us working on our beloved game believes Conflict of Nations is one of those rare forever games that, as long as we continue to care for and nurture together with our honoured community, will be around with us for a long time.

Our content strategy directly supports our vision as the years of content releases build-up; it strengthens and compliments the massive variety of gameplay to try out.

While much of the initial game’s impression is shrouded in a heavy veil of complexity, the underlying core mechanics are simple and timeless, keeping legacy content relevant and interesting over the many years.

The game has over 900,000 monthly users, what do you attribute this success to, and can you share anything on how you capture audiences across various platforms?

Yes, we are truly humbled by how many players out there are passionate about the same kind of game we love to build and play ourselves!

It’s been a steady growth over the many years, and much success comes from establishing and nurturing a strong core community. Many supporters, contributors and members out there have been on this journey together with us for a very long time, so we can’t speak about Conflict of Nations’ growth and success without their recognition.

Conflict of Nations is as multi-platform as any other website, and that has been a challenging but instrumental factor of its success. Built on a custom web-based technology foundation, the game can be played on nearly any platform that supports a browser.

That fact alone, of course, is not a successful formula, but when considering what makes Conflict of Nations unique, its gameplay, then it all starts to make sense.

Being what we like to coin, a long-term strategy game where matches are played over a duration of weeks or months, the ability to log in and play wherever you are with whatever device you’re on is a major advantage. You’ll sometimes have friends or allies negotiating for a time-sensitive support of their war-front, so quickly jumping into the game for a few clicks or actions really supports the style of the game.

Interestingly, for our more core players — including ourselves, of course — the game allows you to log into your account from multiple devices simultaneously, so using each form factor of mobile, tablet, and the big screen has its own advantage.

A cunning strategic player may use the big screen as a grand strategy command view, a tablet as a tactical centre of an ongoing front, and a mobile screen to micro-manage production or economic details. All with real-time feedback. This being one of many ways we support our community with how they like to be engaged.

The game also celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. With a decade under its belt, how do you reflect on the game's journey?

When reflecting back on the decade of hard work it took to prove this wild and crazy idea of the game, it certainly did not look so promising or straightforward back then.

Who knew that a real-time strategy game played very, very slowly would enrich strategic gameplay? Who knew that a player-versus-player game could be fair and competitive as a monetising free-to-play game, and who knew that a deeply complex grand strategy game could fit so well to the mobile platform and be done so wildly successfully.

We certainly did not really know what we were getting ourselves into as the team committed days and nights to champion the unknown. Looking back at it now to the very beginning, it takes a special team and a strong vision to set out against best practices and all odds.

Over the many years of the game, what would you say have been some of the biggest challenges in maintaining its success? And how have you tackled these challenges? 

On the outset, many people’s first impression of Conflict of Nations can be dismissed as a typical strategy game, but making it has been anything but. Our rulebook of free-to-play strategy games has been completely thrown out the window as we’ve continuously experienced that traditional methods of success do not apply here.

That’s what excites me about being at the forefront of creating success in a genre that no one has truly explored yet on this scale.

The path to today has been riddled with complexity and pitfalls. Being a web-based technology foundation for our custom game engine brought with it many non-traditional challenges to solve. These range from the high technical demands that must be met for any game let alone a grand-strategy-massively-multiplayer-real-time-strategy game, to how deeply complex and accessible the gameplay is. 

Inventing an online strategy game that is as accessible as free-to-play while maintaining a core competitive PVP gameplay — Free-to-play and fairness may be considered an oxymoron to most, but somehow, we’ve made it work — is among the most difficult challenges we’ve battled with and overcome.

In Conflict of Nations, one of our core design pillars is that any player with the guile of strategy and tactics can always pose a versatile threat to those with deeper pockets. That’s what brings so many different types of players together onto one global battlefield and have fun playing in their own individual comfort.

And on the opposite side, do you have something you’ve enjoyed most working on the game or something you and the team are proud of? 

So much! Seeing the personal growth of many talented individuals in the team, discovering their own craft and mastering skills so unique to this product has been a motivational story.

The early days of discovering the Conflict of Nations’ success secrets and uniqueness, going against all odds of the market throughout a confidence-testing few years, all the way to seeing its explosive growth and popularity. 

Rarely in our industry do we get the opportunity to pioneer a new genre category. While what we are doing by itself is not groundbreaking, the culmination of many well-fitting pieces has made what we believe is a unique class of game that scratches an itch no one else does. This accolade has to be one of the proudest for many of us.

Finally, is there anything else you have upcoming that we should know about, and what are the future ambitions for Conflict of Nations: World War 3

Every day, we grow more excited about all the possibilities and things we want to do with this game and our community.

We know we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of more exciting game features; our design book, requests from our community and unique vision fill our backlog sky-high.

Only now that we’ve laid a solid foundation for this unique gameplay does our journey into the many future decades really begin. We are investing into our product now more than ever, and we hope our beloved fans and players look forward to experiencing a very exciting game going forward.