LawBreakers is free for now, but shutting down in September

Boss Key Games’ shooter LawBreakers is now free-to-play on Steam (as spotted by Wario64), but the game is set to be shut down in September. The gravity-based combat game was previously priced at $29.99. Last month, Boss Games’ head Cliff Bleszinski closed the development studio, following the commercial failure of the game.

A note from “The LawBreakers Team” on Steam today, explained the situation: “In light of the unfortunate news regarding Boss Key Productions shutting down, we regret to announce that we will be sunsetting our support of LawBreakers on September 14, 2018 as we are not able to operate the game. Our servers will remain open until then and the game will be made free-to-play on Steam for all players effective immediately. Please note that any and all new in-game purchases will also be disabled and we will not be able to accept any refund requests.”

In LawBreakers, players take on the roles of specialized fighters who inhabit low gravity arenas. Competing against Blizzard’s Overwatch, the game failed to attract a sustainable audience. Although it lacks the charm and polish of Overwatch, it is a tightly designed shooting game with well balanced units.

The game was first announced as a free-to-play, but publisher Nexon then decided to opt for a $30 price. “We did a lot of discussions and even more research. There are some core free-to-play games that do well, but for us, we didn’t want to go down the well of players buying ‘energy’ or other sleazy things,” Bleszinski said two years ago. “A lot of core gamers have a negative reaction when they hear free-to-play because they think they’ll get ripped off.”

When he stepped away from the game last month, Bleszinski said: “Four years ago I set out to make a world class video game studio and I hired some of the best talent in the videogame industry. They worked tirelessly to produce quality products and, while we had our ups and downs, I’d like to think we had fun doing it. LawBreakers was a great game that unfortunately failed to gain traction.”

Here’s the Steam link.