Storied game designer Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski, who worked at Epic Games in the Unreal days and was lead designer on the first Gears of War trilogy, recently celebrated a bittersweet anniversary.
“11 years ago I started Boss Key. Sigh. It was amazing at first and then, well, it broke me for a good long while,” he wrote in an X post on July 21. “Still bitter about the internet finding it hilarious that my studio folded.”
Bleszinski left Epic Games in 2012 to start up his own outfit, Boss Key Productions. Its debut game was LawBreakers, a 2017 arena FPS with high-velocity combat, Overwatch-y heroes, and a ball voiced by Justin Roiland.
It was really fun, but a high skill ceiling and cringey humor narrowed its appeal, and it never found a steady audience. Nexon ended support for the game in 2018, and Boss Key Productions closed the same year after a failed battle royale Hail Mary.
LawBreakers was an early example of a story that’s depressingly common these days: A promising multiplayer game shut down because it wasn’t immediately successful, with folks online expressing an uncomfortable glee about the outcome.
Bleszinski, at the time a dudebro figure in an industry tiring of dudebros, had a lot of confidence in LawBreakers as an idea, and it wasn’t baseless: a $30 FPS with cool movement abilities, classic arena modes, and no FOMO was a real good time. But in 2017, getting people excited about an arena shooter was about as likely as a teen buying a flip phone. Overwatch was the biggest FPS in the world and PUBG was in the middle of exploding.
To fully illustrate how surrounded Boss Key Productions was in the summer of 2017: Just a month after LawBreakers hit shelves, Bleszinski’s old friends at Epic released a little side mode to its PvE co-op shooter called Fortnite Battle Royale.
Would LawBreakers, or at least something LawBreakers-shaped, work today? It didn’t work out for Concord, though that $40 FPS had more problems than its price tag. And considering the price of trying and failing is becoming a laughing stock, it doesn’t sound like Bleszinski is eager to jump back into game development.
“I’m happy consulting at this point,” he wrote in an X reply.
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