Veteran game developer Cliff Bleszinski's new studio, Boss Key Productions, has announced that the company will be moving on from its first and only game, LawBreakers, stating that the game failed to find an audience.
In a statement published on the studio's website earlier this week, Boss Key confirmed that LawBreakers will not be making the shift to free-to-play, as the company had previously been rumored to be considering, and that the developers now plan to move on from the game to work on other projects. The statement cited the game's failure to attract an audience large enough to justify and sustain the costs associated with changing the game to operate around a free-to-play business model, or continue in another form while being supported by the studio.
"The fact is LawBreakers failed to find enough of an audience to generate the funds necessary to keep it sustained in the manner we had originally planned for and anticipated. And while a pivot to free-to-play may seem like easiest change to make, a change of this magnitude takes publishing planning and resources to do it."
As the statement itself bluntly said, this decision should come as no surprise. When LawBreakers launched in August of last year, the game failed to attract many players, with sales numbers falling well short of other direct competitors, such as Overwatch and Battleborn. That latter title was not considered a success, and yet still managed to reach #19 in the ranking of Steam's top 100 most played games. Steam's data suggests, however, that LawBreakers never managed to attract player numbers high enough to appear on Steam's top 100 most played games at all.
Following the game's launch, Boss Key detailed its planned post-launch roadmap, but much of it failed to materialize. In late December of last year, the studio published a brief statement on the Boss Key website stating that "we are not in an advantageous position" to deliver the content from its Q4 2017 roadmap. Rumors circulated that the company was considering a pivot to a free-to-play business model for LawBreakers, but it now seems that Boss Key plans to move on from the game entirely, stating:
"We will continue to support the game in its current state, but we also need to focus on other projects with fresh creative leaders. We have been working on something new and we can’t wait to share more about it! It’s a passion project that we’re in complete control of."
Although the statement claims that Boss Key will continue to support the game, the clarification of "in its current state," strongly suggests that the studio is cancelling any and all planned future content updates, and probably patches and the like as well. While the pedigree of Cliff Bleszinski, the founder of Boss Key and former design director of Epic Games, was initially seen as likely to attract fans to the game, that expectation has clearly been proven incorrect, and Bleszinski himself has described the experience as "humbling." Fans of his past work can only hope that Boss Key has learned from the failure of LawBreakers and is approaching its new project, whatever it may be, with a better sense of the gaming market and what gamers are likely to be drawn to.
LawBreakers is available now for PC and PS4.