10 Ridiculous Reasons Video Games Were Blamed For Failing
5. It Was Too "Woke" - LawBreakers
LawBreakers was an attempt by legendary Epic Games developer Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski to break into the hero shooter genre, which received broadly positive reviews yet failed to hit commercially, resulting in its player-base falling off a cliff in the months following release.
Less than a year after the game's summer 2017 bow, Bleszinski's Boss Key Productions label was dissolved, and a few months later LawBreakers' servers were switched off.
The game's failure clearly frustrated Bleszinski deeply, who later claimed it suffered from him making it too "woke." In a rather deranged statement, Bleszinski said:
"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."
Yet the game being diverse and "woke" really had nothing to do with its failure. The biggest strike against LawBreakers is that, compared to a similarly themed game like Overwatch, its heroes simply didn't have particularly distinct aesthetics or personalities.
No hero shooter can succeed without iconic characters, and so it wasn't long before players lost interest in the game and its whitebread roster.