When Pokémon Go launched in the summer of 2016 an inevitable flurry of similar location-based games arrived in its wake.
Today, not too many remain, but Orna is still going, and steadily growing. It’s a fantasy-RPG take on location-based play that has now racked up 4.5m downloads, and it was initially built by one coder.
It has now outlasted the likes of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Minecraft Earth, The Witcher: Monster Slayer and The Walking Dead: Our World, big-brand location games made by huge, well-known mobile game studios.
Orna creator Northern Forge now employs just nine staff, and is proudly tells us that it has not added any pay-to-win, paywall or gacha-like features to the game in the last eight years of operation, though the accepted industry wisdom suggests it probably should have.
“Our survival comes down to the fact that we chose to build a strong community instead of an economy first, as counterintuitive as that might sound,” says Northern Forge founder Nate Beacham. “For the first few years, I was a one person studio. That pure bootstrap essence means I had the ‘luxury’ of focusing as much as I could on building what the players actually wanted.”
“You don’t necessarily need predatory design to build a sustainable, multi-million download live-service game,” he continues. “Aggressive, short-term monetisation might look great on a quarterly chart, but it burns player trust. I truly believe the future of mobile isn’t in tricking the player; it’s in collaborating with them.”
Beacham says that as the game’s community and his team grew, Northern Forge offered more and more new paid content that players wanted, while also keeping those purchases optional.
“We simply won’t do gacha, stamina meters, or paywalls on anything affecting the ability to progress in the game,” he continues. “Because we respected our players’ time and wallets, they stayed with us. In a volatile market, a fiercely loyal community has been the ultimate armor so far.”
Discord is a big part of keeping that community onside, of course. And Northern Forge has actually hired most of its staff from its player community – an idea that has countless benefits, says Beacham.
“In traditional tech, you spend months onboarding developers to understand your product and your community. When we hire directly from our player base, we are bringing in people who already have hundreds of hours of deep domain knowledge and an innate love for the community. For a small indie studio, that organic alignment of passion and talent is irreplaceable.”
That tight focus on community has also allowed the Canadian studio to hear tales of how Orna players have rebuilt their physical health after illnesses, lost weight or managed social anxiety through Orna’s gamified walking features.
“Just like Pokémon Go, it’s the essence of inadvertent gamified fitness,” says Beacham. “If you give people a compelling, cooperative reason to step outside, they’ll walk billions of collective miles without even feeling like they’re exercising.”
Orna’s community has even helped localise the game into 18 languages, and the Northern Forge team is currently focused on creating a new content drop for 2026’s Green Game Jam.
And though its team is lean, Northern Forge is not planning on ever using AI in future development. “In our game, every sprite, piece of gear, and line of dialogue in Orna is made by a human being,” adds Beacham. “If it’s in contrast to the way a lot of the industry is heading, that’s okay with us. We believe it’s a huge USP and our community is all about it.”
