LogInMembers of the Harebrained Schemes studio discussed the lessons they took away from The Lamplighters League, a game that Paradox Interactive described as commercially weak and a “big disappointment.”
When it hit in 2023, The Lamplighters League was neither a triumph nor a failure. It was a novel turn-based tactical game set in an alternate 1930s and created by Harebrained Schemes, the team behind a series of popular Shadowrun and Battle Tech games.
While Lamplighters scored mixed to positive reviews and was played by nearly 400,000 people, a week after release, publisher Paradox Interactive called the “commercial reception” for the game weak and a “big disappointment.”
Harebrained, which was acquired by Paradox in 2018 and then nearly gutted months before Lamplighters League’s release, went on to regain its independence from Paradox months after the publisher announced it was writing off $22.7 million in predicted pre-tax profits from the game.
Looking back now, years removed from the process, members of the studio say there are some clear lessons to be learned from what went right and what went wrong in creating an entirely new property that some now call a hidden gem.
Harebrained Schemes
Hairbrained Schemes was born out of a side project by Halo developer Bungie.
In 2011, Bungie announced Bungie Aerospace, a mobile initiative designed to provide independent game developers with publishing support.
Mitch Gitelman, a video game industry veteran who once headed up the Xbox Live Arcade, was brought on as a consultant for the effort and was soon paired up with Jordan Weisman on a pirate game – Crimson: Steam Pirates – Weisman had pitched to Bungie.
Bungie’s “Harold Ryan and Pete Parsons put us together to make the game so they could learn by doing,” Gitelman said. “We were having so much fun that about halfway through our blazing 10-week development schedule, we decided to stay together. By the time the game was done, we were Harebrained Schemes.”
The studio was conceived around a single idea: The joy of making games with a team.
“We’d both spent years at a megacorp and were tired of people constantly looking over our shoulders,” Gitelman said. “All we wanted was the freedom to entertain people and do whatever project inspired us next. We made games as fast as we could to keep the learning and cash flow rolling. Improvise, adapt, overcome.”
Mike McCain, who worked at Harebrained for nearly nine years from its inception and recently returned as executive producer, described the culture at the studio as experimental.
“It was built around this mix of veterans and fresh talent and fresh voices so that it was this melting pot experience that we all came up in,” he said.
Chris Rogers, now the creative director and studio lead, has been with Harebrained for more than 13 years.
“The culture was very much go, go, go,” he said. “Like, ‘Let’s come up with ideas. Let’s make them happen.” There was a lot of energy on the floor, and a lot of it was driven by (co-founders) Mitch and Jordan.
“Jordan liked to say that you can tell if someone has a smile on their face while they’re making a game; that was a real guiding principle for us.”
After Crimson and Strikefleet Omega both did well in the mobile games market, the team turned to Shadowrun, a science fantasy tabletop RPG created and owned by Weisman, for its next game. Struggling to find a publisher, the studio turned to the relatively new Kickstarter platform for support.
The team found such success with Shadowrun Returns on Kickstarter – pulling in about $1.9 million – that the studio returned to it to fund two more video games and a board game.
It also helped shape the studio’s approach to game development.
“Kickstarter enhanced the culture that was already developing,” Gitelman said. “The team was composed of flexible, creative, and talented people like Chris and Mike who didn't come with a lot of baggage and who had the ability to ‘plus’ any idea. We already enjoyed working fast, and we shared similar tastes and work ethic.
“What Kickstarter added was a real connection with our audience. It was a thrill to be out on the tightrope, sharing our development journey with an enthusiastic audience that was rooting for us to succeed. It gave game development a sense of humanity, connection, and purpose that I miss deeply.”
McCain said the team worked through Kickstarter so much that it didn’t so much influence the studio’s process for making games as it created it.
“You were talking with the people who were excited about your game,” Rogers said. “You were working with the audience and getting excited about the game and seeing the things that the audience got excited about. You were in really direct communication with them.
“That was really formative for the Shadowrun games and for BattleTech.”
It was while working on BattleTech, the studio’s final Kickstarter-backed game, that the idea of partnering with or even selling to publisher Paradox Interactive came to life.
“We’d been on the rollercoaster for seven years while watching the marketplace get more and more crowded and the business become more and more complicated,” Gitelman said.
In 2013, when Shadowrun Returns shipped, about 750 other games appeared on Steam. Five years later, when BattleTech shipped, the annual number was about 12,000.
Rogers said it felt like the sun was setting in an era that allowed a studio to crowdfund the sort of game they wanted to make in terms of production cost.
“There was a feeling like it’s a great party, but it’s starting to get a little late,” he said. “You could feel the game industry starting to change.”
Gitelman said the studio felt it had two choices: take an equity investment to build an internal publishing and business team or sell to a publisher with an established audience.
“At that point, we’d been through a lot as indies and were looking for a stable platform to make our games,” he said. “We’d developed a positive working relationship with our publishing team at Paradox, and they convinced us that we were the right fit.”
McCain said the changing landscape that the studio saw as they wrapped up BattleTech also played into the decision.
“We were trying to figure out how Harebrained fits into it,” he said, “and there was a good opportunity there to sort of hitch our wagon to them.”
Paradox Purchase
In 2018, the same year Paradox published BattleTech, it also acquired Harebrained Schemes for $7.5 million.
“They were the publisher for BattleTech, and then we ended up becoming a part of the family,” McCain said.
Rogers said that it seemed like a really good fit. While the team enjoyed the direct connection they achieved with fans through Kickstarter, that process also meant that they were spending a lot of time not making the game.
That wasn’t the case with Paradox, which had established practices for marketing and such.
Going into the acquisition, the team at Harebrained was still working on downloadable, post-release content for BattleTech, which had landed positive reviews and a number of award nominations when it hit.
The studio was also starting work on what they assumed would be its next big game: BattleTech 2. Finally, there was a smaller team playing around with the early concepts for a 1930s-based tactical game inspired by pulp magazines called The Lamplighters League.
“Going in, we saw ongoing development of BattleTech 2 as a big part of why Paradox wanted to work with Harebrained,” Rogers said. “Lamlaighers was kind of off to the side as an interesting thing.”
“It was an incubation project,” McCain added.
So the team mainly focused on wrapping up BattleTech and pre-production on BattleTech 2.
When the team met with Paradox, though, the publisher decided not to green-light the sequel and instead asked the studio to shift its attention to The Lamplighters League.
“Lamplighters was the riskier bet for us,” Rogers said. “We saw BattleTech as having an audience that believed in the game, and the audience was warming up with the game, and it was really starting to unfold for them.
“But we took (BattleTech 2) to Paradox for a gate and to pay us for a gate, and they passed.”
That surprise decision to shift focus from what seemed like a sure success to a long shot created some tension in the studio, Rogers said.
The Lamplighter League
The Lamplighters League is a turn-based tactics game set in an alternate version of the ‘30s, where players set about trying to stop a tyrannical cult called the Banished Court.
Players control a team of unique characters as they blog-trot through a chunky campaign that offers up a variety of settings, a thrilling story, and, of course, turn-based combat.
But it started as a slightly different sort of game.
“It was all taking place in a small European country,” Rogers said. “You’re basically rebels that were going to take down a sort of fascist Duke.”
Rogers said the initial intent of the game was to create an ownable IP, something that could be recognizable and feel a bit like Indiana Jones or The Mummy.
“It would evoke those feelings of a connection, but at the same time be its own thing, have its own mythos that could be expanded,” he said.
Jordan Weisman got his start in tabletop role-playing games, and the team was trying to create something that could feel like it was set in a TTRPG universe.
“It was wholly ownable and could be expanded,” Rogers said. “You could deep dive into what does the Lamplighters League look like in India or China? Or here’s a module set in New York. That type of idea was the central driving premise.”
Woven into that high-level conceptual approach was an improvisational combat style.
“It’s all one thing; it’s trying to create this pulp magazine, Brendan Frasier’s Mummy feeling where the stakes are high, but there is a sort of kind of joyousness about it,” he said. “There should be great one-liners, and there should be these amazing impossible recoveries. Scrappy underdogs make it happen.”
With those concepts locked down, the team spent a lot of time creating “amazing prototypes” for the game to allow for extensive A/B testing. The testing worked to lock down gameplay mechanics and genre, trying everything from real-time and turn-based to a mix of the two.
“The team worked really hard to create and validate these different play styles,” Rogers said.
They landed on a system that involved infiltration in real-time, but then converted to turn-based when the player was discovered.
As the team worked on the game, they also had to shift to a new process that involved a pipeline with gates, in which they had to bring the title to Paradox for review, something they hadn’t done as an independent studio.
The Lamplighters League passed the gate, but not unconditionally.
Paradox worried that the strategy layer of the game was too hardcore for the overall pitch of the title. So, while continued development was greenlit, the publisher also asked for some changes that led to a redesign and an increase in the game’s scope.
“Those were risks we were taking on,” Rogers said. “They were big risks.”
And then COVID hit.
As with most studios creating games at the time, Harebrained had to quickly pivot from an in-person, single-office studio to everyone working from home.
The studio quickly discovered just how important – at the time – all being in the same office was to the Harebrained culture.
“It was us looking over each other’s shoulders, standing at each other’s desks, chatting all the time,” Rogers said. “That watercooler culture was a big part of how we were able to reach creative alignment and hash things out and still feel good with each other.”
The studio eventually figured it out, but the shift from in-house to remote impacted the game’s development for a time.
As the game approached its October 2023 release, Paradox laid off a “significant” number of staff.
Mitch Gitelman said that the layoffs happened in part because, during the development of the game, Paradox refocused on its original business strategy, and Harebrained Schemes no longer fit.
“So once The Lamplighters League was close to Xbox certification, they laid off all non-essential personnel, leaving the rest to get the game out and finish the in-progress DLC before they divested,” Gitelman said. “ Although the remaining team was badly hurt, they were determined to honor their teammates’ efforts, and they continued to work long hours to deliver the best game they could under the circumstances. That close to launch, the focus was on bugs, so losing developers meant more bugs at release.”
Rogers said that despite the issues, the people the studio worked with at Paradox were great people.
“A lot of people advocated for us, and a lot of people were doing their best under circumstances that I don’t necessarily understand, like what precisely the pressures they were under.”
The game also didn’t seem to receive the sort of marketing support you’d expect from a big title. It was officially announced in March and released seven months later.
Without the drumbeat of constant updates and player interaction that typically comes with a Kickstarter campaign and without a war chest for publicity, the game landed seemingly with little marketing.
McCain, who hadn’t yet returned to the studio when the game shipped, said he had already started reconnecting with the team.
“From a semi-outside perspective at the time,” he said. “I’ve never seen a team fight so hard and with such passion to ship a game against such strong headwinds.”
The Lamplighters League hit on Oct. 3, 2023, on console and PC and received middling reviews.
One week later, Paradox Interactive announced it was writing down the development costs of the game.
“The Lamplighters League is a fun game with many strengths. Even though we see cautiously positive player numbers in subscription services, the commercial reception has been too weak, which is frankly a big disappointment. Game projects are, by their nature, always risky, but at the end of the day, we haven’t performed at the level we should. It is painful but makes us more eager to roll up our sleeves and do better,” Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive, was quoted as saying in the statement from the publisher.
Wester and Paradox Interactive declined to comment for this story.
Gitelman said he was saddened that there was seemingly more coverage of that press release than of the game’s announcement or launch.
Rogers said news of the statement wasn’t exactly surprising.
“We had indications internally that Paradox was frustrated with the rising cost of development for the game. The majority of the studio was laid off four or five months before the release,” he said. “So, shock would maybe be a strong word.”
The Lessons
Looking back now, two and a half years after the launch of The Lamplighters League, Rogers and McCain don’t view the game or its release as a failure. But they do see moments in its production that could have been handled differently.
Chief among them was the mixed greenlight the developer received from Paradox that both tweaked the game’s direction and size.
“I think a soft yes or a bad yes is really dangerous,” Rogers said.
In retrospect, he said he wishes that he would have asked for more time to go back and make another proof of concept showing off the requested changes to do more A/B testing.
“Part of me wishes I had said we’re not going forward,” he said. “We didn’t pass this proof of concept. We need all of these other things set in place before we push forward.
Getting a soft yes feels good, but you also know you shouldn’t be scaling into production.”
The lesson learned is you scale and shift into production when you know everything you are going to build.
“You know, you know, you know,” he said. “It only becomes more expensive.”
Rogers said they could have stepped back further from the process and had a tough conversation with Paradox about hitting a particular window and how the risks were dangerous.
“We should have talked about slowing down,” he said. “We need more time on this.”
And that was before COVID hit. While the studio can’t control something like an international pandemic, it did figure out a way to make the new reality of working from home work for the studio’s culture.
Today, the studio remains remote, but by choice.
“It was a lot of being very thoughtful about communication,” Rogers said.
Where communication within the in-person studio was something organic and natural, when Harebrained shifted to remote work, the team needed to develop a more purposeful approach.
That meant making sure people were present in some way during important conversations, assuring that the team was in sync with one another, even if they were working asynchronously.
“There were a lot of one-on-ones,” Rogers said. “It was very easy for smaller teams within our teams to be working within their goals and ever so slightly fall out of alignment with each other. That represents friction; it represents time.”
McCain said that the team has been able to better optimize for autonomy now.
While Gitelman said he’s not a “big lessons guy,” he does think that one simple change made during COVID could be valuable to other developers.
“For a long time after lockdown, the project only had official Show & Tell meetings on Zoom every two months or so,” he said. “As a result, the project felt stagnant, and stagnancy feels like death when you’re making a game. Our solution was to change our weekly meetings to focus on each multi-discipline feature team reporting their progress in a common slide deck.
“The results were nearly instant. Cool new screenshots every week. Cool new demo videos every week. A new sense of accountability to have progress to share every week. But most importantly, it was a regular, genuine celebration of the great work going on everywhere on the project. Teams started impressing each other. Then, they started inspiring each other. The project leapfrogged forward after that. Momentum begets momentum.”
The third big takeaway from the development of The Lamplighters League has everything to do with the audience.
“If you look at Harebrained story we’ve been very grateful about the symbiotic relationship we have with our audience,” Rogers said. “They are supporting us and supporting development, and we are excited to be making games for them.”
While working with Paradox meant the team no longer had to take on the sometimes distracting responsibilities of communicating with their audience, it ultimately also meant that the studio wasn’t supporting their community as much.
“It was by far the longest time that Harebrained worked on a game that wasn’t publicly announced,” McCain said.
Gitelman said, looking back at the game’s development, he regrets allowing the studio to “go dark” during the development of Lamplighters.
“The short window we had from announcement to release made it infinitely harder to reacquire our audience, especially in this crowded marketplace,” he said.
Rogers said he now believes that unless you have a massive war chest for marketing, it’s important to start building your community right away.
“That gives something new the time to find the people that will love it and to get them excited for the opportunity to be a part of it,” he said. “I think that’s going to be a big part of people’s strategy moving forward, even if they have a big war chest or venerable IP.
“Depending on your situation, players’ excitement is more important than development funds in a weird way.”
Graft
On January 1, 2024, Harebrained Schemes once more became an independent studio and is currently working on its next game.
“It was clear that our strategies didn’t align and that our capabilities weren’t aligned with where Paradox was going,” Rogers said. “And they were gracious enough to be open to us taking ourselves back independently.”
The studio’s new game is GRAFT, a post-cyberpunk survival horror RPG set in a massive, dying space station. In a little more than a year, the studio created multiple prototypes for the game and switched to working with Unreal Engine 5. It’s also making sure it applies the lessons learned from the development of The Lamplighters League.
Perhaps most noticeably, the studio has been very open about the new game and its development with its community.
“We announced the game last September,” McCain said. “We’ve built more than 40,000 wishlists on Steam this year. We’ve been engaging a lot more on social media, just sharing progress about the game, getting development out there in a way that really harkens back to those early Shadowrun Returns days.
“It’s very lean and scrappy.”
Rogers adds that the team took a lot of time internally deciding what it was going to focus on.
“We pitched ourselves a lot of different ideas and vetted them and did prototypes and took them to friends and stuff like that before we found we were sitting on the right thing for us to make next,” he said.
McCain said he feels like he’s at a start-up again. Rogers added: “But with all of those experiences. It’s like playing the sequel.”
Gitelman, who remains an advisor at the studio, says he’s happy to see the audience growing with Graft, even at this early stage.
“The reactions they’re getting are really gratifying to see,” he said. “I love to see screenshots and videos of their progress, and I really enjoy Chris’ videos about the realities of indie development.
“In 2025, authenticity is the new punk.”