The game developer Cliff Bleszinski, known for Gears of War, recently recorded two major flops. Especially his game LawBreakers is said to have flopped because it was overly politically correct.
Who is Cliff Bleszinski? The developer worked on the Gears of War franchise and left just before Fortnite was released from the studio Epic Games. He then founded his own studio named Boss Key. However, it has since shut down after developing two flops:
- Lawbreakers was released in 2017 for PS4 and Windows and was supposed to be a competitive first-person shooter but never managed to build a player base
- Radical Heights was a battle royale game that also did not find success
Especially regarding the downfall of the game LawBreakers , Bleszinski has now commented. One of the reasons for the failure is said to be that it was too politically correct.
Troubled by “gender-neutral bathrooms”
Bleszinski describes the failure as follows: He first made it clear that it was not just political correctness that was to blame, but also many other reasons. It was just one of many problems that led to LawBreakers’ failure:
- He should have completely rethought the game when it became clear what a giant Overwatch was – a game that Lawbreakers was often compared to
- and he should have pushed his own design ideas more strongly
Nevertheless, political correctness was one of the criteria. Bleszinski provided several examples of what he and his studio might have done wrong:
Instead of “this game looks good”, it became “the game with the ‘woke Bro’ trying to shove his dirty politics down our throats with gender-neutral toilets”. Instead of “these characters seem fun”, it became “this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier”. Instead of “who will I vote for”, it became “a white guy using the diversity of shoelace makers in his game and then smelling his own self-satisfied farts in interviews” instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.
Cliff Bleszinski on Instagram
Bleszinski says he regrets relying on political correctness. He also states that this can be done if the developer studio already has a hit that secures the developers. However, this was not the case for Boss Key.
How did the developer studio fare in general? After Bleszinski left Epic, he founded Boss Key and immediately started working on LawBreakers. However, after the game failed, they turned to the battle royale genre in “one last desperate attempt,” as the developer stated on Twitter, and released the game Radical Heights.
However, the shooter could not stand out from the strong competition around Fortnite or PUBG and also failed. It only caused quite a stir during a Fortnite outage.
In May 2018, the developer studio then shut down. That was only 4 years after its founding.
Apparently, Bleszinski is still struggling with the failure and continues to write about the reasons even almost 2 years after the closure. This is quite understandable, as the developer was once considered a genius and one of the most influential developers when he achieved great success with Gears of War.
Can you understand Bleszinski? Or do you say that the failure had completely different reasons? If you are looking for successful shooters, then check out here:
