LawBreakers, the competitive arena shooter developed by Cliff Bleszinski’s game studio Boss Key Productions and published by Nexon, has been struggling to retain its playerbase following the game's launch in the summer of 2017.
In their most recent quarterly financial report, Nexon named one element in particular as a major cause for LawBreakers’ disappointing sales numbers: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
During its Q3 Financial Earnings Call meeting (a transcript for which you can read here), Nexon named PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds specifically, saying that the timing of the battle royale game’s early access launch had a severely detrimental effect on LawBreakers:
“Our results in North America in the third quarter were below our outlook, mainly due to the sales from Lawbreakers being below our expectations. We had very high expectations for its launch; however, the timing of its launch turned out to be unfortunate, specifically the blockbuster PC online game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds came out right about the same time, making the market environment very tough for first-person shooters in general and for LawBreakers.”
The timing of PUBG’s launch and the fact that it went on to absolutely dominate the PC gaming scene throughout the rest of 2017 certainly didn’t do LawBreakers any favors, but it should also be mentioned that Boss Key’s title was also competing with other online shooters which had a similar setup, games like Blizzard’s Overwatch and Bethesda’s Quake Champions.
Despite its less-than-ideal performance, LawBreakers is still trucking along as of this writing, though its prospects of surviving through the entirety of 2018 likely just got a bit dimmer if Nexon’s report is anything to go by. If you still want to give LawBreakers a try despite all this doom and gloom following Nexon’s findings, it’s available now on both PC and PlayStation 4.