Lawbreakers
Lawbreakers launched to a fairly middling critical reception last year, with critics citing poor technical performance and poor matchmaking as hindering the performance. It also struggled to differentiate itself from genre-leading rivals such as Overwatch. Lawbreakers wasn’t terrible by any means, but it needed to be immaculate to topple its heavy-hitting competition that already boasted substantial communities. Unfortunately for developer Boss Key, that wasn’t to be. Lawbreakers never recovered from its shaky first impression, and only three months later, active players dropped to dismal numbers.
When it was announced in May of last year, it looked like a game hoping to get in on the hero-shooter action that Overwatch was already dominating. Sadly, when it launched, the Overwatch community had largely already written it off. Lawbreakers could have broken into this market, but due to a lack of differentiation from others in the genre – the only real change it made to the genre was the implementation of low gravity, which, after everything was said and done, felt more like a gimmick than anything else — it failed to grab the attention of many. On top of that, its message wasn’t clear. First it was a free-to-play game with mircrotransactions, and then it was converted to a $30 game. When it did finally launch, it went about as good as you can imagine. With a peak Steam player count of 7,482, it’s safe to say this game bombed. Sadly, for Boss Key Productions, the number of players continued to drop — in the last 24 hours, the peak player count was 56. In a last-ditch effort to save the game, it was converted to a free-to-play model. Then, a little under two months ago, it was announced that the title would see its servers shut off this September. In just one month, this game will be dead, bringing the total lifespan of this game to barely over a year.
Radical Heights
Poor ol’ Cliff Bleszinski. The guy just wanted to keep his studio, Boss Key Productions, alive. If Lawbreakers was Boss Key’s attempt to carve a niche in the hero-shooter market, Radical Heights was the company’s attempt to cash in on the success of the Battle Royale genre. After the plummet towards Lawbreaker’s end, Bleszinski announced Radical Heights to little fanfare. Simply put, this game was, like Lawbreakers, too late to the market. PUBG and Fortnite (which, ironically, was a game originally announced by Bleszinski when he worked for Epic Games) had already dominated the market and still do today — Epic Games is an $8 billion company now.
Still, though, enough people gave the 80s-inspired Battle Royale shooter a go, with its Steam peak number reaching 12,314 — nearly 5,000 higher than Lawbreakers —but, with a drop-off that occurred almost as quickly as Lawbreakers’, Radical Heights wasn’t long for this world. A month after its release, the player base had already dropped below 1,000. To this day, the player base hasn’t broken past 1,000. In fact, in the last 24 hours, its peak count was 17, which isn’t even enough for a full match. Just a few months ago, on May 14, Bleszinski announced that Boss Key Productions would be shutting down, marking an end for not only Lawbreakers, but Radical Heights as well. The servers are still live for Radical Heights, but according to Bleszinki’s studio closure announcement, the shutdown of its servers are imminent. Today, its subreddit has less than 3,000 users subscribed with posts ranging from sadness to anger and everything in between.
The Culling 2
No game has failed in recent memory quite as hard as The Culling 2. The Culling’s production ended six months ago and after radio silence from the developers, Xaviant Games, The Culling 2’s release date was announced on July 9, a day before it was released on July 10. That was strike one. July 10 also happened to be set in the same week that Fortnite’s heavily anticipated Season 5 launched. That was strike two. Releasing a Battle Royale game the same week as the launch of the world’s most popular Battle Royale game (and possibly most popular game overall) is probably not the wisest move. Strike three was the game’s lack of understanding in what made it popular. The original title was a melee-focused Battle Royale game with a small number of players in each match. The Culling 2 completely ignored that and instead launched as seemingly a copy of PUBG, much to the community’s dismay. Today, you’ll find The Culling 2 and The Culling subreddits plagued with angry players. The description of the subreddit, which only has 114 users, reads, “this sub remains as an archive to the s**tshow that was The Culling 2.” Most of the posts there read similarly.
Simply put, the launch of The Culling 2 could not have gone worse. With a peak player count of 249, it was only a matter of time until this game would see the final nail in its coffin. Surprisingly, that nail came from the developers themselves, who just over a week after the game’s launch announced that The Culling 2 would see its servers shut down and itself pulled from all marketplaces. Xaviant Games isn’t giving up just yet, though. After pulling The Culling 2, Xaviant Games launched, or rather, re-launched, The Culling. In their video announcing this, Xaviant Games’ Director of Operations, Josh Josh Van Veld, all but asked fans to ignore that The Culling 2 ever existed and instead asked that fans allow them to refocus their efforts on the game their fans originally fell in love with, The Culling.
Agents of Mayhem
Agents of Mayhem launched on August 15 last year, and it all but tanked. It’s tough to say who this game was for. Even the developers weren’t sure. In October, Jim Boone, one of the game’s leads, said this:
“The fact that it is a new IP, in this day and age, means it can be hard to get the right kind of attention. At the same time we had just enough of that Saints Row trimming around it, that I can see how consumers might have looked at it and gone: ‘Oh, it’s a new Saints Row game. Oh no, it isn’t. Is it? I’m not quite sure.’ I don’t know if that contributed to it or not, but it is interesting to think about why it didn’t strike the right chord. I sometimes wonder if the material just didn’t capture people’s fancy in the right way… was the tone just not right? It is a really weak answer, but I have the same question that you do, and I am anxious to dig into it with the team, who have spent a lot more time than I have so far on it.”
And if sales numbers are any indication, he was right: players were over Saints Row and anything set in that world. In its first week, it failed to sell more than 70,000 copies on consoles (for reference, Saints Row 4 sold one million copies in its first week), which for virtually any AAA game, is a clear indication of impending doom — sure, it has likely sold more since then, but even if that number doubled, 140,000 could still be perceived as disappointing for a studio as large as Volition. That doom became a reality when a little over a month after the game launched, the studio behind Agents of Mayhem, Volition, was hit with a massive wave of layoffs that saw over 30 people (of the 200-person company) let go. Today, the game is still live, but in the last 24 hours, the peak amount of players on Steam reached only 216 — the peak overall for Agents of Mayhem is 3,665.
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