LawBreakers

» see lawbreakers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

lawbreakers shipped on 8 august 2017 on pc and ps4. cliff bleszinski's new studio, boss key productions, had spent three years building it, nexon put up the publishing money. the pitch was a first-person hero shooter with zero-gravity zones inside the arena, ten characters at launch, meter-fed ultimates. reviews landed favorable, metacritic 76 across both platforms.

this is the same year that pubg was eating the attention budget of every shooter on steam. i was thirty three in august 2017, still in ankara, watching hero shooters flame out from the sidelines. battleborn had already collapsed the year before. overwatch was locked into first place. anyway, whatever room there had been for a third hero shooter had closed by the time lawbreakers went into open beta.

this happened more in the /r/games and /r/pcgaming corners of the internet than anywhere near me. really though, the launch steam concurrent count peaked around three thousand and fell under a hundred inside a month. nexon cut the price. bleszinski's team went free-to-play in june 2018 to try to save it. by then the studio was already pivoting.

i did not touch this game. hero shooters were not something i was tracking, and cliff bleszinski was a name from the gears of war era whose new studio i mostly knew from tweets. still, the arc was legible from the outside. a name developer with epic-era credit came back to try a new genre and the market had moved.

~ the record ~

~ how it looked ~

lawbreakers ran on unreal engine 4. the arena maps had zero-gravity pockets you could shoot through, floors would flip. anyway, the tuning around gunplay was closer to unreal tournament than overwatch. the ttk was faster than blizzard's game and the movement was quake-influenced. really though, the pitch was "hero shooter for the players who thought overwatch was slow".

still. the character roster was ten at launch, with a rooftops-and-neon aesthetic that reviewers described as harder-edged than blizzard's cast (or whatever it was called). the two-team five-versus-five format matched the genre norm. no single-player mode, no offline component. every mode was online, every mode required nexon's matchmaking backend to be alive.

~ the studio collapse ~

boss key started work on a battle royale prototype in late 2017 as the lawbreakers numbers kept sliding. this happened more inside the studio than in public. the prototype shipped as radical heights on 10 april 2018 into steam early access. the framing was "x-treme early access", a bright neon 80s-tv aesthetic, dropping in on a game show. cliff bleszinski wanted a fortnite response and had three weeks to get it out.

this part i mostly read about later, the reception was harsh. reviewers called it a rushed cash-in. arjan brussee, co-founder, left in december 2017 to rejoin epic games. by may 2018 the concurrent numbers on both boss key titles were terminal. bleszinski announced the studio closure on 14 may 2018 in a twitter thread, took a public break, said he was "done with the games industry".

~ the day the servers went ~

nexon ran the lawbreakers servers for four more months after the studio folded. really though, they killed the game on 14 september 2018. for a title that was always-online for every mode, that was the actual death date. the disc and the free-to-play client became unplayable in the same second, and no offline or lan version was ever released.

this part you had to be paying attention to the boss key story arc for. bleszinski came back to the industry a few years later, floated a possible lawbreakers revival on twitter in 2023, nothing shipped. the game is preserved only through youtube gameplay footage and the small archive of matchmade footage the streamer scene captured during the four-month steam window.

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