• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Lawbreakers dropped to 10 users online.

statham

Member
he made a dumb move. He made Gears of freakin War, most of his fans are still on Xbox, makes it PC/PS4 exclusive.
 

KonradLaw

Member
That was not the point, I believe. Action multiplayer games are subject to the law of playerbase gravity. You go big or you get sucked in.

There's a lot of shooters that manage to get smallish, but very stable userbase, with 500-2000 peaks, which isn't huge, but not have problems with finding players online.
 
Deep down, people didn't want to pay money for a game that was advertised and designed as a F2P game first. Yeah they made changes, but the stigma is already there.

That's not the main reason, the game just doesn't look attractive. It's not all that fun either.

he made a dumb move. He made Gears of freakin War, most of his fans are still on Xbox, makes it PC/PS4 exclusive.

lol bring it to Xbox, it won't make a difference.
 

killroy87

Member
Thats crazy. There are 400 people playing fucking Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 right now.

I feel bad for the devs, especially since the game is actually quite good. I hope they bounce back from this
 

Marcel

Member
I do find it legitimately sad - making any game takes work and from what I understand there wasn't much egregiously wrong with the game itself, more its context.

The problem with LawBreakers is it's made for a buying audience that does not exist in any important capacity that would make it a success. The switch to retail from F2P was a huge mistake.
 
Internet threads and articles like this.

But seriously that is a major factor - so much discussion over number fears that people don't buy it and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But it had a number of marketing, art style and promotional issues that resulted in this. It's a damn fun game too. I hope it goes F2P and finds success, it deserves it for how fun it is.
That’s only a very minor part of the story. Take Project Cars 2 for example. Sold about as much (80k) and is about as old, and yet there are 100 times more people playing it.
Lawbreakers doesn’t need more sales. It needed to keep the buyers playing and failed. How good can a game be if after a month 99.9% abandoned it? No one can tell me that the game is great when those are the numbers.
 

-MD-

Member
Butchered how?

They added health regen, they slowed most of the characters down, they took a fast/mobile flanker character and put overly long cooldowns on his abilities in an attempt to slow him down only to give him a raw damage boost to make up for it, they stripped all the fun out of it. In their attempt to rebalance they made one of the easiest characters to play the most powerful so now said character is dominating matches.

The game was already struggling badly prior to 1.4 but that patch really turned a lot of the active players off.
 

AudioEppa

Member
I really liked the game months ago from the beta, But I didn’t purchase it because I had a feeling about low activity being a problem so early in it’s life. Right now I’m waiting for it to become f2p. I hope they don’t do a free weekend on PS4 hoping that will maybe save it.
 

Nero18

Member
Cant help but wonder what the financial situation is over there. Wouldn't be surprised if they got picked up by some chinese company that would fund the transition to f2p and have it maybe slowly picking up steam. Feel bad for the people working on it, they didn't deserve this.
 

C.Mongler

Member
What happened? What was so bad about this game that everyone avoided it like the plague? Is it the price point? Was it the game?

For me, I just didn't see anything notable about the game. I also kind of forgot it even came out until the "LOOK HOW FEW PLAYERS THERE ARE" threads started popping up; there wasn't a ton of fan-fare. It looked like another multiplayer shooter in an extremely saturated market. I had Overwatch, PUBG, Titanfall 2, CS:GO, and even things like TF2 or UT2017 Alpha on deck if I really wanted to play something like that. Did Lawbreakers have it's own quirks and play-styles that made it unique? Sure, probably, but I wasn't going to spend $60 ($50? Can't remember the launch MSRP) to find out. I think the days of full-priced multiplayer-focused shooters are kind of over. If your game clearly doesn't have the hype of an Overwatch or PUBG at launch and you're charging a huge barrier to entry, you probably need to rethink the business model TBH, because games like this can't be successful if they don't have players. Even if it's objectively the best game ever fucking made at its core, if there's no hype and no one is playing it, it practically doesn't matter.
 

Biscotti

Neo Member
sucks. I kinda liked the beta on ps4, it was more easier to play than overwatch imo, but game had some problems.

also the character models were pretty ugly =/

If he thinks Overwatch was the anime of hero shooters than Lawbreakers was the tumblr of hero shooters.
 

PaulloDEC

Member
The way people fetishize the failure of this game weirds me out.

Seriously, people seem to delight in bringing up the constantly dwindling playerbase, but it just bums me out. The game looked solid, nothing I've seen suggests to me that it deserved to burn out like this.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
Should have added bots. Unreal Tournament is still very enjoyable in offline mode to this very date. So is in fact Evolve.
 

noomi

Member
That's really unfortunate. I played the game for quite a bit during release but then Destiny 2 happened.

I was hoping to return to the game at some point, but now... who will I play with?
 

Gator86

Member
Seriously, people seem to delight in bringing up the constantly dwindling playerbase, but it just bums me out. The game looked solid, nothing I've seen suggests to me that it deserved to burn out like this.

Regardless of your stance on the game, it's still an incredibly interesting situation given Cliffy's industry experience and the state of the market for lower-tier titles. It's not just people pointing and laughing, even though there's lots of that. We get these threads for the same reason we get an update every time 10 people buy copies of PUBG.
 

Nick_C

Member
They added health regen, they slowed most of the characters down, they took a fast/mobile flanker character and put overly long cooldowns on his abilities in an attempt to slow him down only to give him a raw damage boost to make up for it, they stripped all the fun out of it. In their attempt to rebalance they made one of the easiest characters to play the most powerful so now said character is dominating matches.

The game was already struggling badly prior to 1.4 but that patch really turned a lot of the active players off.

Yeesh, and the numbers back that up.
 

Vipu

Banned
It wasnt that good game tbh.
If it was free I guess it could have some players but not anything else.
Music was good, thats it.
 

Markoman

Member
A meetup of all ww Lawbreakers players and all Japanese Xbox owners would totally fit into my appartment. Maybe I should consider this.
 

TVexperto

Member
cliffyb is a great visionaire, people are just afraid to admit it and have no idea what they are talking about. lawbreakers is a fantastic game that was marketed wrong.
 

-MD-

Member
lawbreakers is a fantastic game that was marketed wrong.

Well, it was a fantastic game. Not so much now.

But yeah most of the folks that say it was "nothing special" or "mediocre" either haven't played it or played the beta for 20 minutes.
 
They added health regen, they slowed most of the characters down, they took a fast/mobile flanker character and put overly long cooldowns on his abilities in an attempt to slow him down only to give him a raw damage boost to make up for it, they stripped all the fun out of it. In their attempt to rebalance they made one of the easiest characters to play the most powerful so now said character is dominating matches.

The game was already struggling badly prior to 1.4 but that patch really turned a lot of the active players off.

Huh. Did they really think it would make people turned off by initial marketing somehow turn back? That sounds terrible, social-wise...
 

Audioboxer

Member
Of course Elex will sell better. It's made by the people that made Gothic.

I have seen more marketing for Elex than Lawbreakers.

I know, and I'm happy, as I'm a big PB fan.

At this point, I think everything has sold better more Lawbreakers. Even some of those Digital Homicide games probably did better :/
 

-MD-

Member
Huh. Did they really think it would make people turned off by initial marketing somehow turn back? That sounds terrible, social-wise...

Ya'll remember that lame "#SkilledAF" thing? Well the patch that slowed the game way down ended with them signing off saying "Players of all skill levels are welcome!"

Cracked me up.
 
Top Bottom