The studio behind LawBreakers and Radical Heights Boss Key has closed.
The news was announced by studio founder and industry veteran Cliff Bleszinski yesterday in a post on Twitter (below) in which he said that he was stepping away from games for the time being. This isn't the first time that the Gears of War maker has taken a break from video games, having originally retired in 2012 before his 2014 return.
“Four years ago I set out to make a world class video game studio and I hired some of the best talent in the video game industry,” he wrote.
“They worked tirelessly to produce quality products and, while we had our ups and downs, I’d like to think we had fun doing it. LawBreakers was a great game that unfortunately failed to gain traction, and, in a last ditch attempt we scrambled to do our take on the huge battle royale genre with Radical Heights which was well received, however, it was too little too late.”
Boss Key's debut game LawBreakers was released in August 2017 and failed to gain much traction with the gaming community. Early player figures were pretty low with Bleszinski vowing to make sure the game succeeded. Why the team shooter failed to take off isn't 100 per cent clear but publisher Nexon blamed the popularity of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.
A statement: pic.twitter.com/LwJD54bCwL
— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 14, 2018
Boss Key revealed in April that it was going to halt work on LawBreakers only to announce a brand new game, free-to-play battle royale project Radical Heights, just four days later.
That game, it would seem, has also failed to take off. SteamCharts pegs the average player base as between 1,500 and 3,000 per month, with a peak player figure of just 12,314. Servers for Radical Heights will be on for the 'near future', however.
Noise from the studio was not positive either, with Bleszinski publicly accusing Epic Games of trying to poach his staff.
The news of Boss Key's closure appears to have been pretty sudden; Radical Heights leader producer Ron LaJoie seemingly found on about it on Twitter like the rest of us.
Our thoughts are with all affected.
Welp, scratch that. No female ever :(
— Ron LaJoie (@ron_lajoie) May 14, 2018
