Hi everyone,

Since we announced Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 recently we’ve been seeing a lot of supportive comments – which we’re really grateful for. But we also know there are a few unhappy players of the original game, who have been making some very valid points too.

Specifically, the sense that we abandoned the game, and did so without completing the roadmap, in which we’d hoped to bring leaf blowers to the roster of equipment.

While we should have said something at the time, we feel that an explanation is certainly now due, so we wanted to talk a bit about what happened, and why – and what we’re doing to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

If we rewind to the production of Lawn Mowing Simulator, it was a game that we created back in 2019 – and that work was funded by the publisher we signed with: Curve Digital.

We enjoyed working with the team there, and with their support and funding we were able to bring the game out not just on PC, but also Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and even VR, along with a couple of paid DLC packs. Not long after the game’s initial release we put out a roadmap of content, which announced a number of things, including – at the end – the addition of leaf blowers.

However, while we did manage to tick off everything else on that plan, we remained reliant on external funding – and a decision had to be made about whether funds would be made available for that last part of the plan.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to secure that funding, and at the time we didn’t have the resources to fund it ourselves. In the interests of keeping the business alive, we needed to make some quick decisions, and without any other options we moved away from LMS and started providing co-development support for other teams on their own projects.

It was, admittedly, a difficult and uncertain time for the Skyhook team, and in hindsight we were starting to see the signs of what would become a tough time in the games industry – something which is still affecting almost every team today.

While navigating those challenges, our biggest mistake was in not talking to our community about what was (or wasn’t) happening, and what that would mean for the game. Looking back, it seems obvious, but at the time we just weren’t sure what the future would bring and threw ourselves into work for hire.

The good news for Skyhook, at least, was that co-development work wrapped up, and has enabled us to re-start 2025 in a more solid position. This gave us the opportunity to revisit Lawn Mowing Simulator – with the initial plan to see if we could work with Curve once more to make good on various fixes, improvements and content that we didn’t get to a few years ago.

But with fresh eyes, when we looked at the code, we quickly realised that there were a lot of limitations in the way that LMS worked, making certain improvements or content additions very difficult.

To be clear, this isn’t the fault of those who helped create LMS in the first place – during pre-production, the scope of a game is set out, and built accordingly. Our original plans for LMS didn’t envisage some of the additions we later promised, meaning that adding things like mid-session saves were very tough to do. (Indeed, on that very subject, the reason why the recent update hasn’t yet made it to consoles, is precisely because of this!)

Another place where the game was very stretched was the grass technology. What we’d put in place used up most of the available headroom for running the game, and so when we experimented with adding leaf-blowing, it quickly became clear that without rewriting fundamental parts of the game, it simply wouldn’t work.

Again, with hindsight, trying to future-proof the game more by building the game scope with potential post-release additions in mind might have avoided this. While we tried to make the best decision we could with what we knew at that time, the more we looked into the code earlier this year, the clearer the problem.

In the end, we weren’t able to secure any additional funding towards updating LMS with the full roadmap, so we took the decision to use some of the funds we’d saved up to improve what we could within the game’s existing codebase. We released these fixes as a free update, as a way of hopefully thanking the community for staying with us, as well as releasing some new content via DLC on PC (with console support coming as soon as we are able.)

Once we’d understood the challenges (and expected cost) of working with the original code base, we realised it made much more sense to put our resources into building Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 instead, taking everything we’ve learned since the original game to create the game that we all wanted. We have committed to self-funding and self-publishing LMS2 so that we have full control over its scope and destiny, which led to our Open Letter a few weeks ago, announcing our plans.

However, this highlighted our second mistake – which was really just down to a lack of experience on our part. In the past we’ve always worked with publishers, who would take care of communications, marketing, and so on. Therefore we’ve never really spent time talking to the community, which – by the way – can be quite daunting!

As such, we didn’t really provide any context for suddenly announcing new content and then a sequel, which has understandably confused some and led to some very fair questions – for example, why did we abandon LMS and never add in the promised content?

Well, we’re trying to learn as quickly as possible. We’re sorry that we didn’t fulfil our promise in that regard, and we’re also sorry that we didn’t talk to you about it.

Going forwards, with LMS2 now in development, we understand that some of you may not really feel like throwing much trust our way – and we get it. But we are going to be doing it differently this time, to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen again.

Firstly, we’re trying to open the doors on the development process for LMS2, and we will be sharing a lot more about what we’re working on, how we make decisions on design, what goes into art, or coding, or licensing, plus a lot more. We know that not everything we share will necessarily interest everybody, but we want our self-publishing journey to be transparent. We want to answer more questions and be as open as possible (without spoiling *all* the surprises)!

Secondly, since we’ll be showing a lot more (and much earlier than usual), we will be using a labelling system for everything we post in order to give you more context. We think this will fall into four main categories:

FINAL: Anything that is how it will be in the game when it’s released will be marked as FINAL. You can take this as a guarantee from us – whether it’s visuals, features, additional content, etc. If something says FINAL then it WILL happen.

WIP: If you see this on something, then it’s a Work In Progress – and as such, may change (a little or a lot), have things added or taken away, or may not make the final game at all. There will be a lot of this in the coming months, but don’t be alarmed – until the whole game comes together, we won’t know if everything works as intended.

WISHLIST: This means that we’re talking about or showing something we’d like to do, but it will depend on a number of factors, so please don’t take it as something that will definitely happen.

NO PLANS: This means that, for various reasons, adding something to the game that’s tagged with this just isn’t going to happen. We will try to explain why that’s the case each time, as far as we’re able (although some things, like licenses, will be beyond our control).

To show how this will work, let’s take Leaf-Blowing as an example.

In the LMS roadmap, we should have marked it with WISHLIST, because at the point we published the roadmap we hadn’t started working on it – and therefore didn’t know enough to even mark it as WIP.

However, for LMS2, we can label Leaf-Blowing as WIP. We’re definitely expecting it to come to the game, and we’ll be talking (and showing) more about it in the coming months. One of the benefits of starting the game from scratch is that we can completely overhaul pretty much everything from LMS, to ensure things like this will work.

With this explanation and apology, we hope that those of you feeling a bit burned by your experience with our lack of communication on LMS will be reassured; and if not, we hope to change your mind as we progress through development.

Either way, we really do value and appreciate everybody who has been part of the LMS community in the past, and hope to welcome as many as possible into the LMS2 community moving forwards.

For the latest information, and the best place to ask questions, please do consider joining our new Discord channel (see below) and follow our LMS2 Kickstarter page for further updates.

https://discord.gg/U5d5pwec

Best wishes,

The Skyhook Games team