LawBreakers failed because it was too "woke", says Cliff Bleszinski
Be honest with yourself - when you think of LawBreakers, the debut game from Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski’s now defunct studio, what do you remember about it?
For me, I remember a very generic-looking shooter that had a man in it who could shoot backwards. I also remember the reason it was called LawBreakers wasn’t because you went around breaking the law - it was because this was a shooter where one team played as the Law and one team played as the Breakers. Clearly this was the height of creativity.
The game was crushed under the weight of Fortnite and the battle royale craze, so much so that the studio, BossKey, made a clumsy pivot to the genre and released an unfinished battle royale game in Radical Heights.
It wasn’t radical and it certainly wasn’t a high point for anyone. It was bad-ical.
Now Cliff Bleszinski - a grown man who calls himself “Dude Huge”, presumably after his massive f**king ego - is reflecting on the performance of his studio and its subsequent closure. The real problem? It was “woke” and it didn’t have enough Cliff Bleszinski in it.
“Ever since the studio closed I've been wracking my brain what I could have done differently,” the retired game developer said on an Instagram post. “Pivot HARD when the juggernaut of Overwatch was announced. Been less nice with my design ideas and more of a dictator with them.
“One big epiphany I had was that I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided.
“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.
“It's okay to be political when your company or studio is established for great product FIRST. But we were unproven and I regret doing it. (This will be quite the doozy of a chapter in the upcoming memoir.)”
Won’t someone think of the gamer boners. Please, someone, my boner is dying.
No doubt this post will empower the “get woke, go broke” crowd, and that’s clearly the plan here. Why mention his upcoming book if this wasn’t a misguided attempt at promoting it? Well, if the past ten years have taught us anything, Dude Huge, it’s that people who want this crowd as their fanbase ultimately are the ones who have to live with them. Enjoy it.