Boss Key Productions, the studio behind LawBreakers and the recently released battle royale Radical Heights, have shut down. Studio co-founder Cliff Bleszinski announced today that the company is “effectively no more.”
Bleszinski’s statement on Twitter says “Four years ago I set out to make a world class video game studio and I hired some of the best talent in the videogame industry. They worked tirelessly to produce quality products and, while we had our ups and downs, I’d like to think we had fun doing it.
“LawBreakers was a great game that unfortunately failed to gain traction, and, in a last ditch attempt we scrambled to do our take on the huge battle royale genre with Radical Heights which was well received, however, it was too little too late.”
After working at Epic on games from Jazz Jackrabbit to Gears of War, Bleszinski came out of semi-retirement to found Boss Key with fellow Epic alumnus Arjan Brussee. Brussee returned to Epic last year. Bleszinski says that he’s “going to take some time off and reflect.” He adds that “videogames will forever be part of who I am and I hope to make something new again someday, however, I need to withdraw and take this time.”
Of the studio’s two games, LawBreakers released to generally positive reviews last year, but despite continued updates failed to keep a high enough player count to remain sustainable. Radical Heights seemed a bit cynical when it launched just over a month ago, but despite aping the style of bigger games and launching in self-described “X-TREME Early Access” it was still a solid take on the battle royale formula, and managed to attract more players than LawBreakers at launch – though it being free-to-play certainly didn’t hurt.
“To those of you who have support myself and the studio these last for [sic] years,” Bleszinski says, “THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart and everyone who came to work for me.” Servers for Radical Heights will remain up in the near future.