Catan: World Explorers

» see catanworldexplorers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Catan: World Explorers never opened in Turkey. It barely opened anywhere. The soft launch ran in New Zealand, Australia, Denmark and Switzerland, which is the standard Niantic test set, and for most of the planet the game existed only as a press release and a trailer. It died in that state, which makes it the rare grave for something that was never actually born.

The pitch was easy to say out loud, which is usually the warning sign. Catan is the board game where you settle an island of hexagonal tiles, collect brick and ore off the tiles you have touched, then trade with the people across the table. Niantic's whole business is turning the real world into a board. So: cover the actual planet in Catan hexes with a resource assigned to each one, and let people settle the streets they already walk down.

Niantic announced it in 2019, on the back of Pokemon Go money and a stated ambition to become a platform rather than a one-hit studio. The development was handed to Nerd Ninjas working alongside Catan GmbH, the rights holder in Germany. Early access went live in July 2020, which was a strange year to launch a game whose core mechanic requires leaving the house.

That timing gets blamed for a lot of things and I do not think it is the main cause here. Pokemon Go survived 2020 by loosening its distance requirements. What killed this one was more specific and Niantic said so plainly, which is the unusual part.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

Catan works because it is bounded. There is one island with a fixed number of tiles, and every resource you take is a resource somebody else at the table did not get. The trading is the game, and the trading only means anything because supply is short and the person you are negotiating with is sitting right there.

Now scale that to the entire surface of the earth with millions of players who never meet. The scarcity evaporates. There is always another hex. Trade becomes an interface problem rather than a social one. To keep it interesting, the designers had to add systems that Catan does not have, and every system they added moved the game further from the thing whose name was on the box. Niantic's public explanation was exactly this: the design had strayed too far from the board game and had become too complicated.

~ the postmortem ~

The notice went up in September 2021 on the game's own community forum, which is a quiet way to do it. The app came out of the app marketplaces on 17 September and real-money purchases were switched off with it. Players who were still in got inflated bonuses and discounted items for the remaining weeks, the standard sunset generosity, spending a currency that was about to stop existing.

Servers went off on 18 November 2021. Sixteen months from early access to nothing, and it never left early access on any day of that. Niantic ran the same play again in 2022 with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which at least got a global release before it was shut, and the pattern by then was legible to everyone watching: the map was never the hard part, the game on top of the map was.

~ the long tail ~

Catan itself is fine. The board game is still in print and still the thing people name when they want to say they play board games at all. Its ordinary digital versions carry on selling. What failed was not the property.

What failed was a specific belief that held for about six years after 2016: that any sufficiently loved franchise could be poured over a map and would come out the other side as a hit. Niantic tested that belief on Harry Potter and on Catan and on a Transformers game that never shipped, and the only thing that ever held was Pokemon. The map does not carry the game. Pokemon Go worked because collecting creatures in the world was already the fantasy of the source material, and no amount of engineering makes trading sheep with a stranger in another country feel the same way.

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