Cliff Blezinski is a legend in the shooter genre of gaming, helping develop the earliest Unreal Tournament games before eventually designing one of the most popular third-party-shooter series ever made, Gears of War. But that doesn't mean he has some sort of magic touch that everything will just work out. In the case of his latest game and the first one made by his new studio, Bosskey, Lawbreakers has really fallen at the first hurdle.
It can't get anyone to play it. And for a multiplayer shooter, that's a real problem.
Call it generic in the face of more colorful characters in modern shooters like Overwatch, call its movement mechanics and anti-gravity gameplay too difficult for the kids who grew up on CoD run and gun action to get into, blame it on the big drive towards open world shooters with battle royale gameplay. Whatever it is though, Lawbreakers is not doing well at all. It had a spotty launch and its player numbers have quickly dwindled, making it all but destined for the grave.
At the last count, PCGamesN reports that only 10 people were online playing it on the PC. While that's not indicative of all of its play time. We are at a lull right now, with 15 people playing it, but during its daily peaks, it tends to hit around 100. There were around 1,000 people playing it during its recent end of September free weekend, but that quickly fell off afterwards and returned to even lower numbers than before. It's like the influx of players ruined the experience for existing players and didn't pull in any new ones.
Although it's got good reviews and Cliffy B claims that more players will come in the future, it seems unlikely that at this point Lawbreakers will ever recover.
RIP sweet shooter friend. We hardly knew ye.