Whose Fault Is It Anyway, If LawBreakers Fail?

The hero shooter game LawBreakers, created by Cliff Bleszinski's Boss Key Productions, is one of those unfortunate titles that only ever makes news when something bad happens. This time, it has happened because the publisher, Nexon, declared the game a failure and placed the blame for its bad luck on PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

This announcement was made in response to the publisher's most recent financial report, which showed a $32.6 million shortfall that was mostly expected to be made up by LawBreakers.

Investors were understandably not too delighted with this result and demanded explanations.

The response they got is as follows, per Shiro Uemura, Chief Financial Officer of Nexon:

"Our third-quarter results in North America fell short of our outlook, primarily as a result of LawBreakers' lower-than-expected sales."For core users only, LawBreakers is a special first-person shooter. Our anticipation for its debut were very high. Unfortunately, the launch window was terrible since PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the popular PC online game, came out around the same time, which created an extremely competitive market for both LawBreakers and first-person shooters in general.

According to Nexon's reasoning, PUBG is the reason LawBreakers failed. But it's evident from examining the game's past that this argument is not totally convincing.

LawBreakers seemed to be a game destined for obscurity right from the start. As we highlighted in an earlier post from August, the game was originally intended to be released as a free-to-play title, but during production, it was altered to a retail release. The LawBreaker life expectancy was severely harmed by this adjustment, since, while it did have a single high of 7,482 in June 2017, that number was attained during the game's open beta.

Those statistics fell down as soon as LawBreakers officially went on sale in August of 2017. Peak players decreased from 7,482 to 3,003 and, by October, to less than 1,000. Moreover, there has been little indication that it is rebounding. Despite the implementation of a content road map, the player base has declined and is now in the double digits.

Even with that regrettable choice, time was a part in all of this, but not in the manner that Nexon suggests.

The choice to release LawBreakers at a period when the hero shooter genre was (and still is) dominated by titles like Overwatch and Paladins was made rather than PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. In contrast to the previous two, LawBreakers failed to generate significant buzz or get players to switch from other games. Many would tell you that it takes too many cues from successful hero shooters without adding enough of its own to set it apart.There is no better way to verify that truth than to see how much media coverage it receives. When this game hosted a unique Christmas celebration in December, it was the last time it was the subject of extensive media coverage. Prior to that? Additional reports about the declining number of players in the game. As previously said, LawBreakers is one of those games that mostly garners attention when something negative happens, mainly because positive things seldom happen in it.Word of mouth has allowed me to learn about Overwatch and Paladins, even though I personally don't like for the hero shooter genre. However, I am unable to accomplish anything of the such with LawBreakers unless I make a special effort to learn more about it (e.g., by locating Steamchart numbers).Therefore, it seems strange to cite PUBG as the only reason for the LawBreakers' bad luck (neither Overwatch nor Paladins are mentioned in the report) even though PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is the game on Steam at the moment and there's no doubt that it hurt LawBreakers to some extent. In summary, although LawBreakers was never really performing well to begin with, other games on Steam, even those in the same genre, managed to succeed even with PUBG around.While there are several issues with LawBreakers, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is just one of them.