01. Indie Again
Welcome to 2024, it’s a whole new chapter for us at HBS after five years under Paradox’s umbrella.
We spent the months after the launch of The Lamplighters League supporting the game in every way we could with our small team. We are immensely proud of the game and we are starting to see it find its audience and get the recognition it deserves. Multiple outlets have included it in their wrap-ups of the year as an overlooked game or a hidden gem.
Lamplighters, along with BATTLETECH, and the Shadowrun Returns Trilogy, remain a part of Paradox’s portfolio. And also somewhat with Microsoft through the ownership of FASA—look, it’s complicated. The point is that those games aren’t coming with us. As much as we love those worlds and would love to work in them again, we can’t. What we’ve got is our name, our creative fire, and the shirts on our backs. This all comes with limitless creative freedom, but it also comes with some very practical business scrambling.
There’s no sugarcoating it, it’s a brutal time in the games industry. You look at the industry news and the only reason that the articles about layoffs aren’t back to back is because of the ones about studio closures sandwiched in between them. Publishers and investors are getting squeezed by rising interest rates and they need to de-risk any investments as best they can right now.
Publishers do need new games for their portfolios, but they need them to show their promise early and be ready to enter production right as funding starts. There may be some R&D teams out there being given time and space to find the fun (and more power to them), but, talking with people across the industry, that just ain’t where most people’s heads are at this moment. Right now it’s come see us after you’ve found the fun and then we’ll take a look.
It’s daunting just writing all that out. As we’ve said throughout the studio’s life, we keep finding ourselves painted into a corner with no choice but to punch our way out. That’s where our team comes in. We have a small core team working together right now, including many of the key team members from Shadowrun and BATTLETECH, and we’re all excited to be working together on something brand new.
What’s that brand new thing?
We have a pitch that hits all the right notes. It is audacious. It builds on the best of the studio’s history while still being something new and compelling in the strategy space. It’s narratively rich, and there are so many natural connections between the narrative themes and the gameplay systems. It’s the kind of thing that publishers are going to need to see working to believe in it, but once they see it working, hoo-boy, I think they are going to really get it.
So for the next few weeks we’re working on a demo that proves that we can pull this thing off. We’re energized and determined to hang together to bring this game to life. In the coming months we’ll be shopping it around, and then we will see what happens.
In the meantime, we're going to keep scheming, no matter what. See you soon!
