We ourselves were mixed on The Lamplighters League.
“It was reviewed OK - I liked it too.
“So maybe there is only one game.
There are certain genres that are like that.
Paradox had strong suspicions that The Lamplighters League would flop, Lilja confirmed, based on preorder numbers.
As such, the apparently mutual decision to split with Harebrained came about pretty quickly after release.
“The game was basically commercially dead on arrival,” Lilja commented.
“And the studio, this is what they do.
They’re not going to be very good at it.
So good, let’s go our separate ways.
“And the decision happened really quickly at launch.
We can cheat a bit by looking at pre-orders.
It’s very rare that game has low pre-orders and then takes off at launch.
We have not seen it, somebody else might have.
I did clarify with him that by “number one” in the genre he meant XCOM.
The company’s past dalliances with the format includeEmpire Of Sinfrom Romero Games, which released in 2020.
So why did they keep trying with the XCOMlike in its wake?
“There we messed up the execution, quite a lot,” Lilja told me.
“The Lamplighters League was a competently made game, decently reviewed, and it did work.
So it didn’t say anything about the market, really.
“Execution is everything,” Lilja reiterated.
“That’s the logic that I’m trying to refer to.
So maybe there’s XCOM and nothing else.
Because it seems to me that the survival crafting genre, for example, is infinitely big.
It seems to be more ‘number one or nothing’.
“Then again, I like other turn-based tactical games, likePhoenix Point,” he added.
“But there seems to be something to that.
It would be interesting to delve into that.
For what it is, I think Lamplighters League is a good game.”
The ray of hope here is that Harebrained Schemes are still alive and kicking.
Their first post-Paradox project, Graft,looks splendiferous.
It’s also, as some readers noticed, a real-time game.
Fingers crossed that this isn’t an early indication of a great dearth of XCOMlikes to come.
