LawBreakers hasn’t had a great start to life. Cliff Bleszinski’s FPS was pitched as being the next big thing, but it’s proven to be a major disappointment in terms of sales, even though its critical reception was favorable. Now the game has hit another unfortunate milestone, with it falling to just 19 concurrent players on Steam earlier today, showing further evidence that its developers are struggling to turn things around.
Earlier this month the game fell below 50 players on PC, an unfortunate statistic that caused Cliff Bleszinski to consider changing his online persona. “I can be very cocky and very brash on social media,” the LawBreakers game director said. And realising that, you know, we have a fledgling player base. It’s been very humbling for me. I’m going to continue to iterate on this game, continue to add to it. And try to be less of a dick, honestly.”
However, it looks like Bleszinski is going to have to turn things around fast for PC players, with the game now more-or-less dead on the platform after falling to just 19 players at 2am this morning. According to SteamCharts, the game has 179 players online at the time of this writing, which is a healthier though still unsubstantial number.
There are multiple factors that have contributed to LawBreakers‘ lack of success. It received a distinct lack of marketing, for one, while comparisons to Overwatch appear to have hindered rather than helped it in the long run. That, and the game’s indistinguishable cast of characters unfortunately helped contribute to it not really registering on many players’ radars, and news of a low player count is always off-putting to those who want to invest in an online-focused multiplayer game. With many currently struggling to find active online lobbies, it’s no wonder that people aren’t buying the game.
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Right now, it seems like the only course of action to keep LawBreakers alive would be to go free-to-play as soon as possible. According to Bleszinski, the PS4 version of the game is performing better than its PC counterpart, but it seems very unlikely that it could be considered a success on console. Hopefully Cliffy B and the rest of the team at Boss Key Productions think of a solution fast, because otherwise LawBreakers is shaping up to be one of the biggest flops of the year.
