Lawbreakers

LawBreakers is a fast-paced competitive arena shooter set in a near-future version of Earth where a cataclysmic event called the Shattering destroyed the moon in 2049, permanently destabilizing gravity across much of the planet. In the chaos that followed, two factions emerged: the Law, a paramilitary police force attempting to restore order, and the Breakers, a coalition of outlaws and mercenaries profiting from the lawless new world. Players choose from nine distinct roles spread across both factions, each with identical counterparts on the opposing team, competing in five-on-five objective-based modes across gravity-warped arenas where entire sections of a map could become zero-gravity zones, forcing players to fly, grapple, and shoot in three-dimensional space with no ground beneath them. Critics consistently praised the game's mechanical depth and the genuine novelty of its low-gravity combat, calling it one of the most technically skilled shooters in years, a reputation that ultimately reached too narrow an audience to sustain it.

LawBreakers was designed before Overwatch existed and spent its entire development in its shadow. When Blizzard announced Overwatch in late 2014, a Boss Key artist allegedly remarked internally that the studio was finished before a single line of LawBreakers code had shipped. The fear proved well-founded. Overwatch launched in May 2016 to enormous success, defining the hero shooter genre in the public imagination more than a year before LawBreakers even reached players. By the time LawBreakers released on August 8, 2017, it entered a market where Overwatch had already accumulated tens of millions of players and was entrenched as the definitive game in the space. Every preview, review, and social media discussion compared the two, a comparison LawBreakers almost always lost on accessibility alone.

The game's commercial situation was dire from day one. It launched outside the Steam top 100 most played games and never broke into it, peaking at just over 7,500 concurrent players on Steam across its entire lifetime, an unusually low ceiling for a studio with Cliff Bleszinski's profile and pedigree. Within three weeks of launch, the Steam concurrent count had fallen below 400. The game's steep skill curve, which critics praised as a genuine differentiator from Overwatch, worked against it: LawBreakers rewarded high-skill arena shooter veterans who were a much smaller audience than the casual players Overwatch had successfully converted. The decision to exclude Xbox One, a platform where Bleszinski was synonymous with the Gears of War franchise, cut off a significant potential audience, a choice Bleszinski himself later expressed regret over.

Boss Key attempted a last-ditch pivot in early 2018, scrambling to release Radical Heights, a battle royale game rushed out in early access to chase the Fortnite moment. It launched to polite reviews but failed equally quickly. On May 14, 2018, Bleszinski announced Boss Key Productions was effectively finished. Publisher Nexon confirmed LawBreakers would go free-to-play and then shut down permanently on September 14, 2018, just 13 months after launch.