What went wrong with Lawbreakers?

Boss Key's Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee reveal the various avenues they're exploring to
recover from a rocky launch

James Batchelor

UK Editor

Thursday 26th October 2017

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Boss Key Productions

Lawbreakers is not off to the best start.

Released in August, the frantic, gravity-bending multiplayer shooter is the debut title from Boss
Key Productions - the studio formed in 2014 by Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski and Guerrilla
Games co-founder Arjan Brussee.

With such talent behind the project, expectations were understandably high but while the game
reviewed well enough, post-launch coverage was not quite as positive. "Launch numbers lower than
Battleborn" is not a headline that would have been well received in the Boss Key halls - particularly
as Battleborn has since seen all development support pulled and been left to die.

At the time, Bleszinski was insistent growing Lawbreakers was "a marathon not a sprint", citing the
likes of Rocket League, Warframe and even the mighty Minecraft as world-conquering games that
began with small communities. That determined optimism remains unchanged.

"As far as I'm concerned, the press can fuck off. We're going to keep making our game for our
fans."

-Cliff Bleszinski, Boss Key

"All I need to do is maintain enough CCU [concurrent users] to make sure that if you join, the
matchmaking works decently enough and people get hooked enough, while also telegraphing every
damn thing we're working on," Bleszinski tells GamesIndustry.biz.

It would be interesting to know what the Boss Key boys deem to be 'enough'. Shortly after our
interview, the concurrent users dropped to as low as ten people - although Bleszinski' believes the
media is particularly keen to highlight any apparent failures his game sustains. He points to a
general pessimism when it comes to certain new releases: "It's not cool to root for things".

This, he reasons, explains the emphasis on the Battleborn comparison, despite the fact that Boss
Key is aiming for a slow start.

"They're just looking for clicks, man," Bleszinski says of the games press. "They're just looking for
ad revenue. We're going to keep doing what we're doing, and they're welcome to print whatever
they want - but as far as I'm concerned, they can fuck off. We're going to keep making our game for
our fans."

And so they have. Since launch, it has released at least two new maps and a new competitive mode
calls Boss League - as well as the tweaks and fixes that are patched into any game these days - and
still has a full roadmap of DLC in the works. The reason for this perseverance is to service the fans
that Lawbreakers has managed to secure.

"Everyone who's played it loves it," says Bleszinski. "You look at the Steam reviews and we're
damn near 90% positive.

"The thing is we don't have enough players yet. We have a small fledgling community that we're
continuing to staunchly communicate with on a regular basis. We're being completely transparent
about updates and patches, and we're continuing to scramble on the longer term things we have
planned for the game."

Bleszinski (left) and Brussee (right) reunited to form Boss Key, and are determined to make
Lawbreakers an eventual success

Despite being co-founder of Boss Key, Arjan Brussee is rarely given the spotlight as most media vie
for Bleszinski's attention. When asked for his stance on this troubled launch, he suggests the early
adopters - few though they may be - might in fact be the game's salvation.

"If you have a lower number of users, there's more room for experimentation and really engaging
with those people, growing it with them," he tells us. "It's a good sign that the users we have right
now are really rabid fans and like what they see. They're defending the game on social networks, so
they're really hardcore community members that will hopefully be the basis of growing the game
further."

"We made such a hardcore game, we didn't spend enough time figuring out onboarding for new
players - but that's something we can fix later"

-Arjan Brussee, Boss Key

Bleszinski adds: "Players are so used to games coming out and being abandoned. If you can have
that core group of fans that you continue to reward, that feel like they were early enough so that as
you grow it they become almost these high priests that evangelise the game to other people - it's all
part of that slow growth."

The trick is not only exciting those fans into such evangelism but also enticing intrigued
newcomers. Already the firm has tried making Lawbreakers free for a weekend, which saw
concurrent users rise to around 1,000 players, but realising the game's potential is going to take
more than price promotions.

"That's where the service model comes into play: working out the inflection points where we can
double or triple the number of users throughout the game's lifetime and hopefully keep them
sticking around," explains Brussee. "That's what we're working on right now, figuring out how to
plan and execute all our different options. Obvious things like free weekends [and] big content
drops.

"When you look at these other games, you can actually see those inflection points when you look at
the graphs. CS:GO's user numbers were pretty flat for almost two years, and the moment they
started doing crates and trading, or when they started doing competitive esports for real, it took off.

Sunshine is set to become the poster child for Lawbreakers as Boss Key focuses on characters

"I'm not saying we have the solution yet, but those are the things we're looking at now to build it up
over time."

Brussee describes esports as "the ultimate dream to achieve" but recognises that the basis of the
game has to be honed first. Early tests of five vs five tournaments near the studio back in 2015 show
that Lawbreakers can appeal to a competitive crowd but, upon reflection, Brussee wonders if
making such a heavily skill-based game for such a group is slowing the growth rate.

"We made such a hardcore game, we didn't spend enough time figuring out onboarding and making
it easier for new players - but that's something we can fix later," he admits. "Right now, it's a really
hardcore game and the people who are good at it, you can see it really clicks for them so they keep
on playing it."

Even without a skills barrier, it's difficult to onboard significant numbers of people with a title that
is designed to grow over time. The eventual blossoming of titles like Driveclub and No Man's Sky
has perhaps taught consumers to hold off for a year or so until a game has gained traction. So how
do you convince players to jump in from the beginning and assist with that formative year?

"That's a question all Early Access games have," says Brussee. "We're not an Early Access game but
sometimes we feel like one."

"The moment you start making stuff that looks AAA but doesn't have a 300-man team behind it,
people are still expecting to have full cutscenes and more depth - but we can't provide that"

-Arjan Brussee, Boss Key

He adds that the AAA nature of the studio's talent and the game's scope don't help: "It's hard. The
moment you start making stuff that looks AAA but doesn't have a 300-man team behind it, people
are still expecting to have full cutscenes and more depth - but we can't provide that. We're stuck in
the middle: we either make something for Early Access that's super broken and looks mediocre at
best, or we make something super polished but people miss the story or that kind of stuff."

While the foundations are there, the characters and story have yet to be fully explored in
Lawbreakers - something Brussee acknowledges is "hurting us". Bleszinski agrees, adding that this
even extends the the game marketing.

"To be frank, we made a mistake," he says. "We have our symbol of the upside down happy face,
Deadzo. A lot of the marketing banner ads led with that, which is the symbol you see when you die
in the game - it's kind of our version of the Gears of War crimson omen.

"When you don't know anything about the game and a banner shows up... Even the name
Lawbreakers, if you don't know about the gravity-defying thing, you're like 'what is this?'. Basically
if you look at that symbol outside of context, it says you're going to have a bad time. We have a lot
of really great characters - Sunshine the Harrier is as tough as she is loveable, so we're going to be
leading with her a lot more going forward so people will know who they're going to get attached
to."

Lawbreakers has a small but active playerbase and Boss Key is hoping to use this to hone its
mechanics and grow the audience

Naturally in this day and age of social media, there are plenty of Twitter users who claim to know
exactly where Boss Key went wrong and how Lawbreakers can be rescued, but their solutions are a
little less practical.

"You'd be surprised how your average fanboy thinks with their heart and can't wrap their head
around business decisions. Yes, games are art but they're also commercial art"

-Cliff Bleszinski, Boss Key

"There's a dedicated Xbox fanbase convinced I hate them for some reason," says Bleszinski. "They
can't wrap their head around the fact that it was a surgical business decision of us looking at an
installed base of Xbox One versus PS4 and we just needed to hedge our bets on the larger installed
base. So there are these weird Xbox fansites that are like, 'see, you should have been on Xbox' and
I'm like 'dude, give it time'. I'd love nothing more than to start porting the game tomorrow.

He continues: "You'd be surprised how your average fanboy thinks with their heart and can't wrap
their head around business decisions. They can't understand that I have 65 employees here that have
families to support and health insurance to pay. There are legal fees, we have to keep the lights on -
there's a lot that goes into business because yes, games are art but they're also commercial art. It's
amazing the amount of people that tweet me saying I should make a new Gears game, or a new Jazz
Jackrabbit."

It would be easy to argue much of the disappointment Lawbreakers has evoked stems from
Bleszinski's reputation and - given his own admission that "I've always been polarising" - his frank
nature when it comes to responding to criticism. But the veteran developer is convinced his name
doesn't carry the weight that people might think.

"If you take your average 16-year-old CS:GO or Overwatch player, they don't know who the fuck I
am, they don't care," he says. "The people who know me are like 30 to 40. Your average 25-year-old
doesn't know. They're more excited about pro gamers, YouTubers or Twitch streamers."

Deadzo, Lawbreakers' unfortunate icon

It's the latter that Boss Key hopes to get on side to help spread the word about Lawbreakers.
Brussee even confirms that the game and its mechanics were designed as much with Twitch viewers
in mind than active players.

"It's been a goal for us to build something that's inherently watchable," he says. "Sometimes that's
hard to do with shooters. The difference is when you watch soccer or basketball, you don't watch it
through the eyes of the player - that would be terrible, you wouldn't have the overview of the field.
That's why we invested in making things like the spectator camera.

"Another thing is that sports work so well because there's always this 'hot potato' being tossed
around, like a ball, and you can focus the action around that to make for easier viewing. I saw
similar things when working on Battlefield with those diffuse-the-bomb type game modes, because
they spectate better and it's easier to understand what's happening rather than having skirmishes all
over the map.

"We've been designing modes that have focal points, but also have drama in them that is exciting to
watch and shoutcast. We're in a new age where that kind of stuff is important."

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It's worth remembering that Lawbreakers, while important, isn't essential to Boss Key's survival.
The studio is already pondering ideas for future projects - Bleszinski is particularly keen to explore
the possibilities of a premium VR game - because as the former Gears developer says: "It's basic
business strategy: you don't put your eggs in one basket."

Nonetheless, the Boss Key boss remains convinced that there is space in the market for
Lawbreakers, which is why his team continue to plug away at accomplishing what they originally
set out to do.

"When it comes to character-based shooters, I've always said there's room for three, maybe four and
I'm hoping we can start beginning to crack into that space," Bleszinski concludes. "I want to carve
out my space and be Pepsi or RC Cola of that market - I'm not going to be Coke because Overwatch
has too much of a stranglehold."
Have you seen these studios?
10 Years Ago This Month: Did Turtle Rock, Big Huge Games, and Illusion Softworks really survive
their acquisitions? Also, Blu-ray puts the final nails in HD DVD's coffin

Brendan Sinclair

Senior Editor

Thursday 4th January 2018

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The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to
what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so
entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer
some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting
happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
Life finds a way... sort of

Regular readers of this column will know we make a point of calling out acquisitions and following
up on what happened to those studios with their new owners. Entirely too often, the answer is that
they didn't make it another 10 years and were shut down. Sometimes the answer is bit messier
though, as is the case with this month's acquisition anniversaries.

Ten years ago, Take-Two Interactive acquired Illusion Softworks, the studio behind Mafia, Hidden
& Dangerous, and Vietcong. Are they still around? Kind of. In 2014, the publisher shut down the
Prague studio of 2K Czech, consolidating the team in Brno and reportedly transferring 10
developers to California to work at 2K's Novato headquarters. Novato also happens to be home to
Hangar 13 Games, which was revealed later that year and became lead developer on Mafia III, for
which 2K Czech did support work. However, last year the studio's Twitter account confirmed that
2K Czech was actually merged entirely into Hangar 13.

Turtle Rock's acquisition by Valve was another odd one. The acquisition itself made enough sense,
as the California studio's Left 4 Dead was going to launch later that year and the cooperative online
shooter was shaping up to be something special. Slightly more odd in hindsight are the quotes in the
story from Valve's Gabe Newell and Doug Lombardi about how the move "gives us a base from
which to expand our development activities in the Los Angeles area" and how Left 4 Dead "will
also help Valve's expansion into the console market."

After Left 4 Dead, the original Turtle Rock was left for dead. (Quietly, to self: Nailed it.)

Clearly, things have changed since then. Valve doesn't develop games much these days outside of
Dota 2, and its last appearance on consoles was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive more than five
years ago. It also no longer owns Turtle Rock. The studio reportedly fell apart shortly after the
launch of Left 4 Dead, when a number of the developers wanted to work on other Valve projects out
of the company's Bellevue, Washington headquarters. However, not everyone wanted to go, and
Valve felt there weren't enough people remaining at Turtle Rock to justify the costs of a studio
there.

In the end, Valve effectively closed Turtle Rock, but the holdouts went on to re-form Turtle Rock
Studios, the current incarnation of which has produced the asymmetrical multiplayer shooter
Evolve, as well as a number of VR experiences including Face Your Fears, The Well, and Blade
Runner 2049: Replicant Pursuit.

"Are Illusion Softworks, Turtle Rock Studios, and Big Huge Games still around? Kind of? It
depends on what you think counts as 'still around'"

We saved the messiest one for last, as January 2008 also saw THQ acquire Big Huge Games, the
Rise of Nations developer which was working on a Ken Rolston-led RPG at the time. The
honeymoon didn't last long, as THQ hit the skids financially and needed to sell the studio just over a
year later. 38 Studios swept in as the buyer, and Big Huge re-worked its project to fit with the IP of
38 Studios' long-in-development MMO project. Big Huge Games' project, Kingdoms of Amalur:
Reckoning, would launch in 2012, just before 38 Studios itself filed for bankruptcy.

That seemed to put a big huge period on the Big Huge Games story, but in 2013 Big Huge co-
founder Brian Reynolds started a new studio that he would re-name Big Huge Games the following
year. And as if things weren't confusing enough, Nexon acquired the new Big Huge in 2016, so this
column can recap this whole saga again in eight more years (which history suggests is just enough
time for it to be acquired three more times).

So are Illusion Softworks, Turtle Rock Studios, and Big Huge Games still around? Kind of? It
depends on what you think counts as "still around."
Victory in HD Day

A decade ago was an interesting and unique time in the history of the console wars, as essentially
every platform on the market would go down in history as a success. The Wii, the Xbox 360, the
PlayStation 3, and the PSP all sold at least 80 million systems over their lifetimes. The DS nearly
doubled that.

But not every war was so free from casualties. One of the biggest struggles of the time was over the
successor to the DVD format, and it was one that came to a merciful end almost exactly a decade
ago. For years leading up to that point, there had been a struggle between tech coalitions led by
Sony and Toshiba over whether their respective Blu-ray or HD DVD formats would be the next
industry standard for physical media.

Predictably, the battle was a mess for consumers. Each side secured exclusive rights from major
movie studios, and from the 2006 commercial debut of HD DVD and Blu-ray players, consumers
who wanted to watch movies in high-def were having to choose between which bizarrely curated
library of movies they preferred. Do you want to pay $700 for a Blu-ray player that lets you watch
Hitch, Lord of War, and Underworld: Evolution to your heart's content, or would you prefer $500
for HD DVD and The Last Samurai, Apollo 13, and Swordfish?

Do you want to pay $700 for a Blu-ray player that lets you watch Hitch and Lord of War to your
heart's content, or would you prefer $500 for HD DVD and The Last Samurai and Swordfish?

Sony's decision to build the PS3 around Blu-ray gave the format a huge leg up, building an installed
base for a tech that wouldn't have sold on its own at that time. And even though Microsoft
dismissed Blu-ray and released an HD DVD add-on for the DVD-based Xbox 360 (which
reportedly accounted for one-third of all HD-DVD drives sold), it could only postpone the
inevitable. After months where it felt like the writing was on the wall for HD DVD, January of 2008
was a succession of brutal defeats for the format that sealed its fate.

Warner Bros. rang in the New Year by announcing that it would be dropping HD-DVD support and
moving exclusively to Blu-ray, saying, "The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could
be missed if format confusion continues to linger." The news clearly rattled the HD DVD camp,
prompting them to cancel their Consumer Electronics Show press conference at the last minute. A
wounded Toshiba released a statement saying it was "quite surprised by Warner Bros' decision to
abandon HD DVD in favour of Blu-ray, despite the fact that there are various contracts in place
between our companies concerning the support of HD DVD." Just a few days later, HBO and New
Line Home Entertainment would follow WB out the door.

In a last-ditch attempt to gain traction (or move stock while anyone could conceivably be interested
in buying it) Toshiba responded to the defections by slashing the price of its HD DVD players by as
much as half, saying, "While price is one of the consideration elements for the early adopter, it is a
deal-breaker for the mainstream consumer."

The bad news kept rolling when retailer Woolworths said it would no longer carry HD DVD in its
stores after seeing the format outsold by Blu-ray 10-to-1 over the holiday season.

"Sales figures clearly show that the market is moving towards one format of high definition DVD,"
a Woolworths DVD buyer said. "The main reason is the success of Sony's PlayStation 3 machine.
Because it plays Blu-ray discs, there are over three quarters of a million homes in the UK that can
view the new high definition format... There is nowhere near that number of HD-DVD players
around."

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Toshiba responded to the snub the way many doomed combatants might, with optimism bordering
on delusion.

"While we're disappointed by Woolworths' decision, it is extremely early to spot which format will
eventually win," a representative said.

It may have been "extremely early" on January 28 when that story ran, but Toshiba had finally seen
all it needed to see when it discontinued the HD DVD format on February 19.
Recapping quickly
The soon-to-be-merged Activision Blizzard triumphantly announces that Guitar Hero has become a
billion-dollar franchise in just over two years, while World of Warcraft has surpassed 10 million
subscribers worldwide.
EA smartly enters the games-as-a-service business with the free-to-play Battlefield Heroes.
EA questionably exits the Marvel games business just months before Iron Man launches the Marvel
Cinematic Universe.
Playtek erroneously claims it's bringing back the ill-fated Gizmondo handheld.
2K Sports fortuitously decides to bury its College Hoops series just a year before rival EA Sports is
beset by lawsuits over its own collegiate efforts which lead to a $60 million settlement with amateur
athletes.