Fortnite and PUBG are among the biggest and most important shooters of the last 10 years. Another shooter tried his luck at the same time, but despite good ideas, he sank. Now the developer talks about that time.
Which game is it about? As the new genre of battle royale games rapidly grew in 2017, titles like PUBG and Fortnite quickly experienced a hype that continues to this day. However, a now-forgotten shooter was also seeking its success back then and found a swift end.
The talk is about the arena shooter Lawbreakers, which was released in August 2017. Its lead designer, Dan Nanni, recently spoke in an interview about that time and how he felt about the fight against the giants.
Here you can see the trailer for Lawbreakers:
The Year of Giants
How did the release of Lawbreakers go? Although Lawbreakers was able to pique the curiosity of hundreds of thousands of fans with a strong cinematic trailer, the developers failed to establish a player base for their arena shooter. According to SteamDB, only 7,579 gamers played simultaneously at peak times, while the competition could excite millions of players.
Lead designer Dan Nanni recently spoke in the VideoGamer Podcast (via Spotify) about that time. In the conversation, he said:
It wasn’t just Overwatch, man. It was PUBG […] PUBG was on top, and at that time Fortnite was transitioning from Save the World to its Battle Royale. And that went into the stratosphere, right? And then Overwatch came and we all just sat there thinking: ‘Oh man, what have we done? We’re like this tiny minnow and around us are barracudas and sharks.’
Lawbreakers only lasted about a year after its release before the servers were shut down. The shooter was not perfect and could measure itself with a rating of 76 from critics at that time (via Steam). But in the end, the competition prevailed.
What lessons does the game designer draw from history? For Dan Nanni, with Lawbreakers also disappeared the work of 5 years into the drawer. In the conversation, he said: “You learn a lot from it […] You learn that no matter how well you play, you have to pay attention to the market. You can easily sink.”
The designer believes that his game would have a better chance today. “Players are more willing to support side titles,” he said in the conversation, likely meaning that players used to have a fixed title that they played continuously. Today, however, gamers are more flexible and switch more between titles.
It would probably have gone a little better [if we had launched today] […] Because then we wouldn’t have been on the rise of Fortnite… I think ideally we wouldn’t have launched when Overwatch was still at its peak, because we were too closely associated with Overwatch. And the problem was this: Gamers want to play with their friends, and if there is a game that their friends are playing that is similar to the one you are playing, you will go there and play where your friends play.
Choosing the right date for your own release is also essential in today’s world of video games. Recently, Path of Exile 2, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 were vying for the attention of players in the ARPG genre: First, Path of Exile 2 annoys the competition with their release date, now Last Epoch strikes back on Steam
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