Shadowrun: Hong Kong © Harebrained Schemes

We’ve seen a few abysmal Kickstarter failures recently, from the likes of Yogventures to Peter Molyneux’s disappointing god game Godus, but it’s worth remembering that for every Clang there’s a major hit , like Lariat’s Divinity: Original Sin, or Tribute Games’ Mercenary Kings.

Crowdfunding sites aren’t just for one-off projects either. Some games studios, through a combination of elbow grease, transparency and excellent ideas, have managed to turn Kickstarter into their main medium through which to do business, using it not as a gamble, but as a platform to launch new products, talk to customers, take pre-orders and cut publishers out of the equation.

There’s no better example than Harebrained Schemes, the American studio co-founded by developer Mitch Gitelman and Jordan Weisman, the legendary creator of tabletop game universes including Shadowrun.

A lot has changed for the studio since its first Kickstarter pitch back in the spring of 2012, for Shadowrun Returns, a gritty RPG based on Weisman’s futuristic game world. It’s successfully released the game to backers, earning several Game Of The Year plaudits along the way, grown to dozens of staff and broached out into tabletop games as well as digital ones.

What hasn’t changed much, however, is the business model. It’s just successfully funded its third Kickstarter game campaign, for standalone Shadowrun follow up Shadowrun: Hong Kong, crushing its $100,000 (€94,000) target by raising $1.2 million (€1.1m) and maintaining its enviable 100% record on the site.

They’re a little bit occupied, in other words. “We’re in ‘Go, go, go!’ mode,” Mitch Gitelman tells Red Bull in a new interview after the campaign closes. “It’s hard to keep track. There’s so much stuff going on at Harebrained Schemes.”

Shadowrun: Hong Kong © Harebrained Schemes

He’s not wrong. Since we last spoke to Gitelman in 2013, the team created a prototype for a hybrid fantasy tabletop game that makes use of your phone or tablet, Golem Arcana, ran a successful Kickstarter for it, and debuted it to wild enthusiasm and lines of people at Gen Con in August of 2014. Then there was expansion follow up Shadowrun: Dragonfall, set in a cyberpunk Berlin, and even a Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut.

“And if that weren’t enough, we also greenlit a new game, Necropolis, a roguelike mixed with timing-based 3D combat, and put it into full production,” Gitelman says. “And now we’re working on Shadowrun: Hong Kong after a successful Kickstarter campaign. We’ve been busy.”

A team of 19 is now hard at work on Shadowrun: Hong Kong, set on the island in a smog-and-neon lit 2056. Unlike Dragonfall, Hong Kong is a standalone game, but its origin story stretches back to the original Kickstarter and the very same poll, Gitelman reveals.

“During our Kickstarter campaign for Shadowrun Returns, we added a stretch goal to add a second city that our Backers would choose. They chose Berlin, which became the setting for Shadowrun: Dragonfall – but Berlin beat out Hong Kong by a very narrow margin. So when we decided to create a new campaign, it was a no-brainer to choose Hong Kong as our next setting.”

To bring the city to life, Harebrained have been working with Hong Kong natives and ex-pats to capture the feel of the Pearl of the Orient, and drawing from the plentiful Shadowrun literature. “We’re also lucky because there’s been some great source material written about Hong Kong for the Shadowrun tabletop game. We love tapping into that for inspiration,” says Gitelman.

All in all, Gitelman estimates that the campaign will clock in at around 15 hours, including the three personal missions with your crew members the team recently added. “That said, your mileage may vary. We’ve had people report over 20-hour play experiences with our other games.”

Gitelman and his team have proved they’re more than capable of delivering on their Kickstarter promises, and hitting budgets and deadlines. Surprisingly though, Gitelman says that hasn’t led them to expand their scope with Shadowrun: Hong Kong.

“On the contrary – our experience in managing successful Kickstarted projects has made us more realistic and conservative about scoping our goals. The way we remain confident is to only talk about stuff we have a plan to deliver and focusing our efforts on delivering that stuff at high quality.”

That includes scaling down the physical rewards to Kickstarter backers after some serious headaches the first time round. It’s digital downloads and goodies only this time unless you sprung for the $180 tier. No more physical discs, Gitelman says with some relief. What’s the challenge there?

“Where to begin? People change their home and email addresses and we have no way of knowing. Years later, some of our backers still haven’t given us the information we need to send them their rewards. The USB dogtags had something like a 20 percent failure rate and needed customer service and replacement. The short story anthology required wrangling a bunch of external writers. Shipping costs went up by 30 percent or more during the creation of Shadowrun Returns. Lots of logistical work. More important than the challenges – the same people solving these problems were the people making the game!”

This time round, the team have been able to knuckle down and concentrate on the game itself instead of mailing lists and commemorative t-shirts. So much so in fact that the game’s estimated shipping date is just a few months away, in August.

“We’ve already gone through months of pre-production and planning. New features are already getting into the game. Several runs have been built and iterated upon. New effects, environments, characters, and animations are in full development and we have new stuff going into the game all the time,” Gitelman says.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong © Harebrained Schemes

Of course, if the game’s campaign isn’t enough for you, you can always make your own. Harebrained is proud of its level editor, which it makes available to all, and Gitelman and Weisman have taken to recording Let’s Play videos of the best fan created campaigns. You only have to look at the love, care, attention, not to mention the thick paste of blood, sweat and tears that have gone into projects like Nightmare Harvest and Shadowrun Unlimited to see the potential Hong Kong will offer is endless.

“Just as with the Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut, the Shadowrun Editor is getting more powerful and is being updated to support all the new features we’re putting into Shadowrun: Hong Kong,” Gitelman says. “There’s a lot of really creative stuff being made.”

While Shadowrun Returns was eventually released on mobiles and tablets too, Harebrained have been quite clear in the pitch for Hong Kong that the game is only destined for desktops this time around – why the reticence for a mobile port?

“During our Kickstarter, we said that we were focusing all our production energies on Windows, Mac, and Linux. That was for a number of reasons,” Gitelman says. “Number one was quality. When you make a game for PC and mobile simultaneously, you must author for the mobile version throughout to manage performance, framerate, et cetera, and it affects what you put on screen and when.”

As big as today’s smartphone screens are, they can be quite limiting on a text-heavy game meant first and foremost for even larger PC monitors, in other words. There’s also the issue of success. Even priced at a modest £1.93, it can be hard to stand out against a swamp of free-to-play games, as we put it. Though the original Shadowrun Returns has been a modest success on Android – Google Play lists downloads between 100,000 and 500,000 – Gitelman says it hasn’t been profitable enough to make it worth their time.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong © Harebrained Schemes

“Number two was discoverability,” he admits. “Yes, the iTunes and Google Play stores contain a ‘swamp of free-to-play’ games that makes it hard to get attention and play. We found that putting out premium title at a premium price got a lot of love from the audience, but it was a smaller one that we can support at this point in our company’s history.”

Not that the experience has put Gitelman and the team off tackling future standalone Shadowrun games. As if Hong Kong wasn’t proof enough of this, he hints that the team is considering more when we ask what other cities he’d love to give the cyberpunk treatment to.

“We love telling stories in the Shadowrun game setting. It’s been around over 25 years for a reason! The future is always in motion but it would be fun to travel the globe to see how the return of magic affects a cyberpunk future. Over the course of the last year, we’ve developed story ideas in multiple settings…I’m just not gonna say which.”

Nor is Gitelman going to reveal what Harebrained’s next studio project will be. As he points out, with the studio’s track record, it could quite literally be anything.

“Oh, there’s no shortage of ideas here. We call ourselves Harebrained Schemes for a reason. So far, we’ve made premium mobile titles, free-to-play mobile titles, a series of RPGs, a tabletop miniatures slash smart device hybrid, and a 3D roguelike action game. You never know what we’ll do next.”