In a tell-all social media post about his LawBreakers game, Cliff Bleszinski divulged his feelings about the failures of LawBreakers.
The game was first revealed in 2015 and launched just a couple of years later in 2017 to terrible sales numbers. The first-person hero shooter seemed to have fallen short for a myriad of reasons, but the co-founder of Boss Key and the developer behind the game had specific ideas on why the game failed to find an audience.
CliffyB, as he is often referred to, mentions in the Instagram post that LawBreakers was too "woke" for audiences, especially with it being the first title under the Boss Key umbrella. Bleszinski states that he pushed his own political ideology into the game. Instead of "these characters seem fun" it was "this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier."
In other portions of the Instagram post, Bleszinski talks about writing a memoir on his profession in gaming. CliffyB has had quite the roller-coaster career. He took a multiple-year sabbatical before coming out of retirement to create Boss Key. In his time with Epic he worked on Unreal Tournament. Of course, he was the driving force behind the incredibly successful Gears of Wars series. He left Epic only a couple years before the explosion that is Fortnite. And most recently he has had his struggles with LawBreakers and Radical Heights, the experimental battle royale game and last-ditch effort for Boss Key.
When the game shut down in mid-2018, the team at Boss Key reflected on the failure of LawBreakers and there was no mention of the game being to "woke" at the time, which is perfectly reasonable. Instead, the reality of stiff competition, not reaching goals with funding, and the fact that the player-base wasn't what the team had anticipated were mentioned.
It's perfectly fair to wonder if CliffyB's "woke" argument is a valid one. Games like Overwatch, a direct competitor of LawBreakers, starred characters from a wide background, and the director of that game specifically focused on diversity and inclusion. LawBreakers, however, struggled in terms of critical evaluation, which could have played a larger role in its demise.
LawBreakers was available for PC and PS4 before being shut down.
