The Lamplighters League a 'Big Disappointment' for Paradox as It Confirms $22 Million Write-Down

That's a shame, the demo was fun, I just have no reason to buy any games at full price.

EDIT: Also, maybe wait longer than a week to declare defeat?

Didn’t this release just this month? Seems a bit quick to say it’s crashed.

And it's Mostly Positive on Steam.

They've ruined the games market to such an extent that it doesn't even have to be the game's fault if it's a flop.

First: A decent, average game is now a flop. In a highly saturated market, this means that 98% of all games will be flops, because people can only buy and play a certain number of games, and the highly acclaimed games were never more than big outliers. Each small problem a game has turns its chances on the market drastically down.

Secondly, I saw The Lamplighters League and I said: "This is a shoo-in for Humble Bundle, I will wait."

Games are worse than lettuce these days. They sell today or become pig feed tomorrow. I got about 60+ games for free this year, not counting F2P games, just normal games, good games, for free, including triple-A games. I got about 100+ games on Humble Bundle for a tiny fraction of their release price, and most of them were not older than a year or two and when the year ends my subscription there will end, because I definitely do not need more games. I get games every few months with my free Amazon Prime subscription because they keep offering me and everyone in my family 30-day paid trials and we keep them on one Amazon games client so we have them all in one place. Then there are Fanatical bundles, and Steam has a big sale so often that it's hard to find a day when there isn't some sort of sale going on.

On top of that, on PC most games stay playable forever. I played more old games (2004 - 2010) this year than new ones, because I have access to so many of them and I lost interest in the "latest thing" because I am flooded with so many new game releases that I just can't keep my interest for them up anymore.

Where is this industry heading? More ingame shop games on mobile and more gambling sports games, but live service hasn't worked out for a lot of games the last two years. Some didn't make it into a second year or just barely when they were thought to live for 10 years or more. At least in Europe video game gambling with loot boxes and alike is under attack.

I look at this and I am happy for my backlog. If this industry collapses, I have games to play untill I am 100 years old and most of them did cost me close to nothing. On top my hardware works forever it seems, no need to upgrade that either. So weird. I am 57 years old and playing games since 2000 and when I started there were less than 70 games coming out per year on Steam, in 2022 the number was 10644 add to that console and Nintendo and others and it's crazy.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/

I probably wouldn't have known about this game for some time had it not been put on Game Pass. Which is another thing. It's on Game Pass.

On the other hand, I saw it on gamepass when looking for interesting looking games to try this weekend and passed it over. So even though I didn't have to pay anything to try it, I didn't. Maybe that's a trend they are seeing on that platform, that interest is low even though it's free access. Though it's also competing with starfield and lies of P on there.

Yeah it's not unexpected. Should have made Battletech 2 instead.

BT2 and not on Unity like the first one
- Yeah unfortunately, it seems HBS are deeply embedded into Unity...

They were advertising it on the Paradox launcher for a while on Cities Skylines and it seemed like kind of a large risk for Paradox but I don’t exactly know why I felt that way.

It seemed like too much advertising for a turn-based tactics game or something. I like turn-based tactics games but it’s certainty a niche genre.

Xcom, xcom2, baldur's gate 3, heroes of m&m, darkest dungeon, The Banner Saga, Age of Wonders, like a dragon, Divinity, etc..
I wouldn't call it niche as some games made more than 50M, but also the market has so many games, few will always fall through the cracks.
- If someone is releasing, say, a western XCom clone and expecting Baldur’s Gate 3 level success, they might have another thing coming… Since it would have a niche audience.
  Like, obviously I’m not talking about games like Baldur’s Gate 3 here, I assumed that was obvious from context but I may not know what Lamplighter’s League is like!
  I was assuming it was more like Hard West, or Wargroove, the Fire Emblem series, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics… there’s a difference between a specific genre and games that are turn-based and require strategy. Hopefully that makes sense.
  Also half of the games you listed are pretty old (10+ years). Yeah, it’s a bit niche. But go off weirdo
  There’s also the Mario + Rabbids series which is still pretty niche if you’re asking me.
- It's certainly a niche setting.

Read some reviews, the flaws don't sound great. It also didn't get very high ratings, so probably they saw the writing on the wall for this one.

Sleeper hits don't make money in games too, I guess, with the way sales are done. Usually most of the money is made within the first month or so, right? I'm guessing they did some analysis and felt that the money wouldn't be coming in.