Because Why Else Would LawBreakers Flop?
Remember LawBreakers? It’s another one of them hero-shooters that came out in August from Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski. It’s actually quite good but…well…no one is really playing it at all and it sold pretty badly.
If you ask us, its failure is due to a number of factors but if you were to ask the game’s publisher, it’s because of one reason: PUBG.
That’s right. Nexon, who published LawBreakers on PS4 and PC, are blaming PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for its own mistakes and poor performance.
“Our results in North America in the third quarter were below our outlook,” said Nexon financial executive Shiro Uemera in the company’s latest financial report. “Mainly due to the sales from LawBreakers being below our expectations.”
“LawBreakers is a unique FPS developed for core users. We had very high expectations for its launch,” Uemura continued, “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.”
Okay, but what about the fact that LawBreakers never generated a ton of buzz before or after its launch, let alone before or after the arrival of PUBG. If anything, the success of other rival competitive shooters like Overwatch, Paladins, and Warframe were bigger hurdles for LawBreakers to overcome and even bigger reasons for it not getting off the ground.
To add insult to injury, LawBreakers’ Steam player count was at its peak in June 2017 during its open beta with nearly 7500 people playing. PUBG was already a runaway success with player counts reaching the hundreds of thousands. It isn’t a good look for Nexon and now they look silly for putting the blame on another game.
What do you make of Uemura’s comments? Let us know in the comments below.