As announced in a Twitter post attached with a lengthy text, Cliff Bleszinski announced that Lawbreakers developer and Radical Heights creator Boss Key Production is effectively shutting down. This news hits us hard as all of us here at The New Byte quite liked Radical Heights for it’s fun, at times even ridiculous, gameplay and crazy artstyle. We salute to the studio and hope that everyone will quickly find work somewhere else in the industry!
Boss Key Productions were the developers behind the over the top arena first person hero shooter Lawbreakers which released in the same year as Overwatch did, but sadly although many free beta phases and free post release weekends were happening, the playerbase sadly was not stable or even big to begin with. Released under the publisher Nexon, the game initially launched for a low but fair price of 40$ on Steam and on the PS4. Most people didn’t like the character design at the time which was more grim and reminiscent of the 90s era of arena shooters. I personally had a lot of fun with the game for the brief time of playing it. But I can very easily understand how players are neither attracted to the game nor interested in playing it for longer periods of time. The game was advertised for the “hardcore” and seemingly directly cuts all newcomers out right away. It’s a shame.
With Radical Heights, me and other friends assumed that game was released into Steam’s early access program for free to try to stabilize the company at least for a bit while the popularity of the game mode seemingly is ever increasing. But as we know now, after merely a month of the game being out, it was neither finished enough before its release into early access, nor did it bring the success that Cliff Bleszinsky and his team at Boss Key Productions needed. We know, that the servers of Radical Heights will still be online for the near future. But whether any development on the game will continue or if it will ever see the release out of Steam early access remains unknown and frankly, quite unlikely. Read our impressions of Radical Heights here. Seems like that was the last attempt of the studio to spin to win.
Read the full statement here:
https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/996092708971274245