LawBreakers

Cliff Bleszinski's gravity-defying shooter, launched into Overwatch's shadow

Shut down
19902026

LawBreakers was a first-person arena shooter with low-gravity zones from Boss Key Productions, the studio Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski founded in 2014, published by Nexon and released on 8 August 2017 for Windows and PlayStation 4. Well reviewed and barely played, it never found an audience against Overwatch; Boss Key closed in May 2018 and the servers went dark on 14 September 2018.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2014
  2. July 2014 Launch
    Boss Key Productions is founded

    Bleszinski returns with a new studio in Raleigh.

  3. 2015
  4. 26 August 2015 Feature
    LawBreakers is revealed

    Low-gravity arenas, Nexon publishing, free-to-play at first.

  5. 2017
  6. 8 August 2017 Launch
    LawBreakers releases

    $30 on Steam and PlayStation 4, fourteen months after Overwatch.

  7. 31 August 2017 Peak
    About 7,500 players

    The Steam peak; under a hundred by winter.

  8. 2018
  9. 10 April 2018 Decline
    Radical Heights

    A last-ditch battle royale, built in months.

  10. 14 May 2018 Shutdown announced
    Boss Key closes

    Bleszinski announces the end of the studio.

  11. 14 September 2018 Shutdown
    Servers close

    Nexon switches LawBreakers off.

The site through time

Browse lawbreakers.nexon.net as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2017 2018 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Boss Key Productions (published by Nexon) 2014–2018 Founded Founded by Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee; Nexon funded and published

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: LawBreakers sold poorly from its August 2017 launch, with Steam concurrency in the low thousands at best and under a hundred within months. Boss Key's last-ditch battle royale, Radical Heights, did not save it, and the studio closed on 14 May 2018. Publisher Nexon announced in June that the servers would shut on 14 September 2018.

Our analysis: LawBreakers was a good arena shooter, and it arrived fourteen months after Overwatch had taken every player it might have wanted, at $30 rather than free, on PC and PlayStation but not Xbox. Bleszinski himself later said that without Overwatch it would have had a shot. It is the clearest case of the hero-shooter window closing on a competent game.

History [edit]

Bluestreak

Cliff Bleszinski, the designer behind Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, came out of retirement in 2014 to found Boss Key Productions in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Arjan Brussee, and announced its first game as Project Bluestreak. It became LawBreakers, revealed in August 2015: a 5v5 first-person shooter set after a lunar cataclysm has broken Earth's gravity, so that arenas had zones where players floated and fights turned vertical. Nexon published it. It was to be free-to-play, then in 2016 became a $30 game, and it launched on 8 August 2017 on Steam and PlayStation 4.

Nobody came

Reviews were solid: fast, skilful, a real arena shooter. Sales were not. Overwatch had launched in May 2016 and taken the entire team-shooter audience; PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was in the middle of taking everyone else. LawBreakers peaked at around 7,500 concurrent players on Steam and was below a hundred by the winter, and Nexon wrote off its investment in the game in its 2017 results. Boss Key made it free for a weekend, talked about going free-to-play, and in April 2018 threw its remaining staff at a cartoonish battle royale called Radical Heights, released in early access in a week; it did not catch on either.

On 14 May 2018 Bleszinski announced that Boss Key was closing. On 8 June Nexon said the LawBreakers servers would be shut down on 14 September 2018, and they were. Bleszinski later said he had lost millions of his own money on the studio and that, had Overwatch not existed, LawBreakers "would have had a shot"; in 2023 he began teasing a return of the game.

The domain today

lawbreakers.nexon.net was retired with the servers; Nexon's site no longer lists the game.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Cliff Bleszinski's new game is LawBreakers The Verge 26 August 2015 [archived]
  2. LawBreakers launches in August on PS4 and PC Polygon 12 June 2017 [archived]
  3. LawBreakers review PC Gamer 14 August 2017 [archived]
  4. Boss Key Productions shuts down Game Developer 14 May 2018
  5. LawBreakers servers shutting down in September Game Developer 8 June 2018

Last verified: 15 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).