Do you remember when Lawbreakers dropped that sweet trailer? Do you remember when the game was released? No, well don’t worry because not many people did. In fact it was reported recently that Cliff Bleszinski (Gears of War) co-founder of Boss Key Productions and publisher Nexon has dropped Lawbreakers. Touted a flop on release, Lawbreakers has been written off and will be shutdown soon as Nexon’s CFO Shiro Uemura stated:
“We will not be accruing any other impairment loss pertaining to Lawbreakers in the future.”
Which in lament’s terms, means that the game is shutting down as they cannot lose anymore money on it. Although there is no real defined amount that they lost, it was stated that it accounts for a majority of the $ million they lost in expenses in Q3 2017. Which Shiro went on to say:
“Our results in North America in the third quarter were below our outlook, mainly due to the sales from Lawbreakers being below our expectations. Lawbreakers is a unique FPS developed for core users. We had very high expectations for its launch.”
So if this game was so unique, what could of been the reason for its failure on launch? Uemura blames PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which he went on to say:
“The timing of its launch turned out to be unfortunate, specifically the blockbuster PC online game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds came out right about the same time, making the market environment very tough for first-person shooters in general and for Lawbreakers.”
The problem is, this argument is hard to make as plenty of games come out around the same time and never had much issues. But at this time last month, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds had a peak of over three million players playing via Steam and Lawbreakers had…. 90. So what the h*** happened? Who really knows but one thing is for sure, Lawbreakers just couldn’t break into the competitive market and this is just them trying to defer blame to someone or something else rather than taking the hit on the chin and moving forward.
Did you play Lawbreakers? If so, was this just a junk game or was it just a small fish in a very large pond?
