“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
-Mark Twain“CliffyB is an out of touch fossil who needs to permanently retire.”
-Me
Cliff Bleszinski is back folks, and he’s ready to give us all some learnin’ with the efficiency and reliability of a two-fingered woodshop teacher. Grab something stronger than a beer, you’ll need it.
CliffyB is a guy who has had a bit of a history of being what you might call a callous BS artist, one ready and willing to burn some bridges with people he thinks he doesn’t need to rely on for income. He’s doing that again. This whole charade has been going on since at least 2008 when Cliffy announced that Gears of War would not be coming to PC due to the amount of piracy on the platform. Cliffy was lying of course, Gears wasn’t coming to PC because of an exclusive deal with Xbox. I don’t think anyone was gullible enough to believe his excuse. It wasn’t until 2015 when Cliffy was selling Lawbreakers that he finally came back and apologized to the PC group only to get a whole lot of the cold shoulder. Oh and he chose this time to snub Xbox players.
See here’s the thing about Cliffy’s statement and apology; they only talk to a very small group of people. You have a tiny portion of the gaming public who know who CliffyB is, a smaller portion who would buy a game based on his name alone, a smaller portion that care enough about his opinion to specifically not buy a game that they would have otherwise because of a personal snub from ten years ago, and an even smaller portion who would actually go and buy the game out of forgiveness if apologized to seven years down the line. Nowhere in that list is enough people to take a game from success to failure.
Just look at Ubisoft who have sold gangbusters on PC despite at one point claiming the platform had a 95% piracy rate.
But CliffyB’s back to tell us why Lawbreakers failed and I’m guessing this egotist isn’t going to really be accepting any blame. For those who don’t remember, Lawbreakers was an uninspired hero team shooter that launched in 2017 on PC and PS4, failed out the gate despite positive reviews, and shut down its servers in 2018. So what was the culprit? It was the wokeness.
“Instead of the story being “this game looks neat” it became “this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms.” Instead of “these characters seem fun” it was “this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier.” Instead of “who am I going to choose” it became “white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews” instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.”
Not really. Yea a dozen people were complaining about the gender neutral bathrooms, but do you really think that it was a big factor in why Lawbreakers failed? Shoving your political ideology into a game is going to lose more than zero sales, no matter what that ideology is. For a niche game that PR blunder could absolutely tank early sales of a game that wouldn’t have sold much anyway. It does not ruin a “billion dollar franchise” as Cliffy wanted it to be, just look at Life Is Strange which performed just fine. How about taking a gander at Overwatch and Apex Legends?
Lawbreakers presented itself to the public as a dull, uninspired game. The aesthetics were generic and boring, the characters are dull and forgettable, not to mention visually indistinguishable during gameplay, the game’s only gimmick wasn’t enough to sell it on, the casual audience that should have made the focus were tossed aside in favor of a tiny hardcore audience, it launched a month before Destiny 2, had no single player content, didn’t have basic multiplayer modes (team deathmatch) that most players flock to, had extremely weak and cringeworthy (#skilledAF) marketing, no visibility, a steep learning curve, useless tutorials, and virtually no way for a new player to learn the ropes while getting steamrolled by hardcore FPS players. Everything Cliffy says to explain his failure, as usual, is demonstrably wrong.
In short, Lawbreakers was screwed from the start on fundamental design flaws, just slightly more so from Cliffy being a rat. Why buy a new game when you already own Overwatch, is what I presume many of the few people aware of Lawbreakers’ existence said to themselves. Now being an out of touch narcissistic fossil, CliffyB spent the following months refusing to take measures to save the game and refusing to (publicly) acknowledge that the title was failing. Instead he went on the attack against the only people who had offered his game support since the only place Lawbreakers was showing positive results was in the review scores. The games press.
He told us to fuck off for not eating the propaganda that his game was doing fine despite public data showing exactly the opposite.
“They’re just looking for clicks, man,” Bleszinski says of the games press. “They’re just looking for ad revenue. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, and they’re welcome to print whatever they want – but as far as I’m concerned, they can fuck off. We’re going to keep making our game for our fans.”
A bold statement as Cliffy’s studio is burning to the ground around him.
It should be noted that Boss Key Studios did not continue to make games for their fans, of which they had next to none since Lawbreakers was in the low double digits of players. Their future would entail hastily cobbling together a shoddy prototype battle royale game in five months and shoving it out with both untextured buildings and a fully functioning cash shop in the hopes that maybe some whales would come around and keep them financially afloat. They didn’t, Radical Heights was a humongous flop and cemented in many minds that Boss Key was incapable of an original thought and solely existed to lazily jump on the bandwagon of whatever was popular at the time.
It’s also quite comical when you consider that Epic threw together Fortnite BR in two months and how much success that had.
I have bad news for you, Cliffy: Nobody outside of a few dozen gamers ever cared about your gender neutral bathrooms. I don’t even think most of MMO Fallout’s readers can remember a single other thing about what made Lawbreakers “woke” without looking it up. I certainly can’t. It was a passable game that couldn’t attract customers because of its dull, uninspired design from a company run by a narcissist who refused to accept its failings until it was far too late to turn back. Lawbreakers wasn’t sold as woke, Boss Key spent next to zero time promoting the game to the “woke” crowd or talking about its diversity.
The public wasn’t turned off because your characters were too ethnically diverse and weren’t sexy enough, Cliffy, they didn’t like the characters because you can’t tell them apart in a lineup. Your excuse also doesn’t hold up when Lawbreakers was full of the kind of macho dude-bro content that would push the woke crowd away regardless.
All you need to know about Lawbreakers is in this video:
So now it’s time to come to the big question of the day, and that is: What is CliffyB selling? What income generator is Mr. “I have an attractive wife and a Lambo” looking to push now that he’s throwing a group under the bus to grovel to another whose money he thinks he’s spurned? I presume it is related to Cliffy’s autobiography which should in all good graces be titled “Denial Isn’t Just The River I Drowned In.”
Otherwise I have no opinion.
MMO Fallout 