Cliff Bleszinski is a pretty well-known video game developer. Mainly known for his time at Epic Games when crafting up Gears of War, the developer had taken his success and left the company to craft up his own studio after the launch of Gears of War 3. That ended up being Boss Key Productions, a studio that didn’t last very long after the titles released failed to meet a stable audience. Thus the studio closed and it left Cliff Bleszinski to reflect on the issues that lead to the company closure.
The studio opened its doors in 2014 and then closed them in 2018. It started with the debut title, LawBreakers, which was a multiplayer first-person shooter. When the game first released, it received some positive reviews but LawBreakers couldn’t keep its user base. Instead, there were plenty of players that dropped the game soon after its release and that resulted in the title going free-to-play in hopes of getting an audience back on the game.
Still, the title continued to find problems with little to no user base. Ultimately, the game was killed off and the development team went on to create a battle royale called Radical Heights. That also was a failure and it left the studio to close down completely. Since its closure, Cliff Bleszinski has commented on the mistakes made and recently he made mention of one issue that may have been a downfall for LawBreakers.
When the game first released, it was exclusive on the PlayStation 4 and PC platforms. Looking back at it now, Cliff feels that making it a PlayStation 4 exclusive was a bad mode as he was known for Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive. Perhaps going through the Xbox platform where more people are familiar with the developer could have resulted in more players trying out the game and sticking with the title.
