Lighthouse Games, the AAA Leamington Spa-based studio formed in 2022 by Playground Games co-founder and former studio head Gavin Raeburn, has revealed it’s developing a “disruptive” driving game and secured additional investment from Tencent to make it happen.
CEO Raeburn and publishing director Alex Bertie spoke exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz about the next steps for the studio.
While it’s too soon to talk specifics around the game, the intention is to take on Playground’s Forza Horizon series – partly because Xbox’s open world driving game has shown just how high the ceiling goes for success.
“The racing market now is very healthy, it’s very good, it’s doing well,” Raeburn says. “But if you look at the market, you look at Horizon…the number of people I’ve spoken to who’ve played Horizon who would say, ‘I didn’t think I like racing games, but I love Horizon’ – it’s been hugely successful.
“If you look at the revenue earning of that game now, it beats Gran Turismo, F1, Need For Speed and The Crew put together. That’s before Horizon went over to PlayStation. That’s massive. I think what that’s done to the market, though, [is] all the other racing developers are now copying a lot of that Horizon formula.
“So the market is successful if you’re [developing] an open world game with cars, but all these racing [developers] are delivering one type of game. That’s the opportunity for us to do something that is very different and disruptive in the racing market.”
Raeburn doesn’t offer up further clues on the shape of Lighthouse’s first game, only that while it’s taking on Horizon, the goal is to innovate.
“I would say we’re not building Horizon. If I wanted to build Horizon 6, 7 and 8, I would have stayed at Playground. [We] didn’t want to do that – [we] wanted to do something new. And that’s what we’re doing now.”
The opportunity, then, comes in thinking differently about what a driving game could be.
“I think what Horizon has shown is that there is a real desire on behalf of gamers to play games with cars,” Raeburn says. “I think it’s just been an underserved sector of the audience for the last 10-15 years. And I think Horizon is shaking that up a little bit, and perhaps that’s why others are trying to copy the formula.
“But again, that’s why we think there’s room for disruption here. People want more experiences. They don’t just want the Horizon experience, and there isn’t really many places you go. You can go to the indie area of the market. Yes, you can find some games there. But there are huge areas that we think we can move into to satisfy a latent desire for different types of car games.”
Working with Unreal Engine has helped the start-up studio experiment quickly to figure its vision out.
“Just working with Unreal compared to the bespoke engines is a revelation,” Raeburn says. “It’s just so quick. You approach it in the right way, you set it up well – it’s one heck of a powerful tool. So we’re really enjoying the creativity that that’s helped unleash.”
“I would say we’re not building Horizon. If I wanted to build Horizon 6, 7 and 8, I would have stayed at Playground.”
Gavin Raeburn, Lighthouse Games
When we spoke to Raeburn in September 2023, the studio had around 30 staff. Now, it’s up to 130, with the additional funding from Tencent helping it expand further.
“The wonderful thing is that 45 of those people have followed me from Playground Games, and Codemasters before [that], and they’re some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. So I’m really pleased with that. [We’re at] 130 people now. I’m looking for around another 50.”
Raeburn says hiring for the studio has been “remarkably easy”. One focus area has been making sure the culture of the company is just right, with a dedicated Ops team supporting new hires once they’re on-board.
To build a cohesive team, Lighthouse hired its leadership first, then hired the people under them. Raeburn himself tries to get involved in every single interview.
For a new studio, working with Tencent has brought Lighthouse a number of opportunities to support its thinking around the game.
“Tencent has been a wonderful partner for us, very forward thinking as a company,” Raeburn says. “They’re hugely supportive of our team and the vision for our game. Tencent – Venture Lab in particular, that’s the support team – has been a great resource to draw upon, helping shape many aspects of our thinking and go-to-market planning, especially with research and data metrics.
“Their market intelligence, for example, has been a real win for us. That’s a real unique advantage to have such a broad range of expertise and data, because it allows us to make better, faster and more important decisions. As a start-up, having access to that level of experience and data, that’s been incredibly beneficial.”
The right partner
The vision behind the game, though, is entirely within the studio’s control. Lighthouse Games is still speaking to publishers about its debut project.
“We’re very focused right now on securing the right kind of publishing partnerships to allow us to bring our vision to market,” says Bertie, who brings years of experience from EA Sports and Codemasters, including the Formula One games.
“That’s going at pace at the moment and has most of the studio focused on various deliverables to help us achieve that.
“Once we have those partnerships in place, that will give us the right runway to start to build the future roadmap for hiring and that allows us to get the right people in to be able to achieve that vision.”
When asked if the current industry trends have made securing a publishing deal more challenging, Bertie notes that a key factor is giving publishers confidence that the studio is going to deliver a high quality product with a clear target market. At a time where there’s never been more competition for players’ attention, making that case is a vital piece of the puzzle.
“I wouldn’t say it’s difficult or easy,” Bertie explains. “I think if you’ve got the right vision, you’ll always find a partner. We’ve had a huge amount of interest because of the legacy of the founders of the company, the quality of the team, and the innovation and disruptive potential of what we’re doing here. So we have no shortage of interest, and we’re in a really interesting place right now.”
Raeburn compares the turbulence of the current moment to the industry Playground Games came into 15 years ago.
“It’s not too dissimilar to 2010, to be honest. We formed Playground [against] the backdrop of the 2008 crash. All the publishers were [trying] to get into mobile and worried about investing in new AAA content at the time.
“Similarly now, the drivers are slightly different, but there’s opportunity within that for the strongest to survive. If you’ve got a strong team and you’ve got a strong vision, you’ll get all the opportunities to work with the best publishers, and that’s what we’re finding.”
Lighthouse is entering the driving genre in a scenario that mirrors the founding of Playground Games: there’s one clear long-running market leader to beat. Raeburn has been here before, only now he’s taking on his own creation.
“If you’ve got a strong team and you’ve got a strong vision, you’ll get all the opportunities to work with the best publishers, and that’s what we’re finding.”
Gavin Raeburn, Lighthouse Games
“I think the biggest fish in the pond really is Horizon,” Raeburn says when asked which games the studio looked at for a temperature check on the genre. “So that’s the one that we’re focusing on beating. It’s interesting looking back at the early days, working at Playground. When we signed the deal with Xbox for Horizon, there were lots of driving studios around then, but there was one game that dominated the market and that was Need for Speed. It absolutely dominated and that was our key competition.
“So that was the game that we focused on. We beat it by Horizon 3. I think this time round, there is one game really that’s the biggest fish in the pond and that’s Horizon. That’s the game we have to beat.”
Lighthouse Games is not the only studio with Playground Games pedigree that’s identified an opportunity to refresh the genre – studio Maverick Games, partnered with Amazon, is making a narrative-centric spin on the driving game.
What’s notable, though, is that in the AAA space, the number of studios actually making driving or racing games remains pretty small. Raeburn sees that as an opportunity, too.
“I think what’s constant is innovation. Can you innovate? There is always room for innovation. There’s always room for something new.
“This isn’t like the extraction shooter space or first person shooter space. There are not many driving studios and when you look at the quality, you think there’s a real opportunity here to do something different.
“That’s what’s exciting to me: there are not many players in our field and I know we can create something great, [that] we can disrupt. That’s very exciting.”
