Former Nexon marketer cancels game expo panel trashing Lawbreakers

A former marketing executive for Nexon has pulled out of a video games expo where he was to have given a talk titled “Lawbreakers: How I Blew Millions Marketing the Biggest Flop of 2017.”

Destructoid on Thursday noticed the panel, set for the DevGAMM Summit at the end of August in Seattle. Vlad Coho, who had been vice president of marketing for Nexon America, was to be the speaker. But after the talk came to light (and drew a sharp social media rebuke from Cliff Bleszinski, who founded Lawbreakers developer Boss Key Productions) Coho has apparently backed out

“My talk was going to be about my lessons learned from the mistakes I made, not about what the devs could have done better or differently. That said, out of respect for the BKP team, I’ve pulled the talk and won’t be mentioning LawBreakers or Nexon if/when I do speak at DevGamm,” he told Destructoid.

Bleszinski, for his part, didn’t appreciate the mention.

It’s no secret that Lawbreakers was a disappointment. Nexon backed the class-based shooter, which launched for PlayStation 4 and Windows PC in August 2017. We were lukewarm to the game but many other critics reviewed it favorably: Lawbreakers simply failed to stand out, particularly against games like Overwatch and the oncoming tide of battle-royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Lawbreakers’ servers will close down next month, and its studio “is effectively no more,” Bleszinski said in May. (Bleszinski is the brother of Tyler Bleszinski, who founded Polygon’s sister site SB Nation more than a decade ago.) Boss Key followed that with Radical Heights, a battle-royale shooter set in a 1980s environment. But it also didn’t draw enough of an audience to keep the studio going.