What happened to LawBreakers? From a $30 launch to shutdown in 13 months

LawBreakers is one of the best-known failures in recent shooter history: a game from a famous designer, with a major publisher, that lost almost all of its players within weeks. Here is the timeline and what the numbers showed. The short version, with the key figures, is on our LawBreakers page.

Timeline

August 2015. Boss Key Productions, the studio Cliff Bleszinski set up in 2014 with Nexon as publisher, reveals that its "Project BlueStreak" is LawBreakers: a fast, low-gravity team shooter. It is planned as free-to-play.

March 2016. Boss Key drops the free-to-play plan; LawBreakers will be a paid game.

June 2017. The release date is set: 8 August 2017, on PC and PS4, for $29.99, with no season pass.

Before launch. The closed beta reaches a peak of about 7,500 players online at once on Steam, the most the game would ever have.

8 August 2017. Launch. MP1st reports a Steam peak of about 3,000 players, well below the beta.

September 2017. GameRevolution reports peaks of 48–49 players on Steam on 8, 11 and 12 September, five weeks after launch. Bleszinski says the PS4 version is doing better.

5 April 2018. Boss Key says LawBreakers "failed to find enough of an audience to generate the funds necessary" to keep developing it. Updates stop.

14 May 2018. Bleszinski closes Boss Key. He says LawBreakers "failed to gain traction" and that its follow-up, the battle royale Radical Heights, came "too little too late".

11 June 2018. Nexon makes LawBreakers free on Steam, turns off in-game purchases, says it "will not be able to accept any refund requests", and sets the end date.

14 September 2018. The servers are switched off.

April 2024. A fan group, the RELB Project, runs public playtests of unofficial servers that a patched copy of the original game can connect to. Bleszinski shares the project.

What the numbers say

The launch peak of about 3,000 was roughly 60% below the beta peak, as Wikipedia notes, so the game started smaller than its own test. Then it fell from about 3,000 to under 50 in five weeks. For a team shooter that matters more than for most games: matchmaking needs many people online at the same moment, in the same region and at a similar skill level, so a small player base tends to shrink faster as queues get longer.

Can you play it now?

Not officially. The game isn't sold anywhere, and Valve's store data no longer returns it. The RELB Project's unofficial servers are the only route we know of; we haven't found a current status or release date for them.