Lawbreakers designer recalls the horror of launching alongside Overwatch, PUBG and Fornite - "oh man, what have we done"

Lawbreakers designer recalls the horror of launching alongside Overwatch, PUBG and Fortnite - "oh man, what have we done" - VideoGamer

Lawbreakers lead designer Dan Nanni discusses the horror of releasing a multiplayer game alongside Fortnite's hype.

videogamer.com

TL;DR: Lawbreakers was Boss Key’s big-budget PvP shooter that Cliff Bleszinski hyped as a “billion-dollar franchise,” but it imploded less than a year after launch. Lead designer Dan Nanni says the real killer wasn’t the game’s quality but the brutal timing—dropping into a market already ruled by Overwatch, PUBG and the meteoric rise of Fortnite. As he puts it, they were a “little tiny minnow” surrounded by “barracuda and sharks.”

Nanni’s takeaway? No matter how solid your mechanics or how slick your anti-gravity combat, you’ve got to respect the competition and the cost of keeping a multiplayer title alive. He reckons that if Lawbreakers had launched today—with streaming services, Game Pass flexibility and gamers more open to side-quest titles—it might’ve stuck around a bit longer.