It is no secret that Lawbreakers has been underwhelming, especially considering the amount of press it received before its release. But the fact that, six months after its release, Cliff Bleszinski’s gravity-defying FPS is averaging under five players on PC is astounding.
According to Steam Charts, Lawbreakers’ current monthly average player base has been 4.8 for the last 30 days. In that month, the peak player count didn’t go over 26. Considering matches in Lawbreakers are 5 v 5, that’s barely enough to make up two full games.
At its apex, Lawbreakers still only managed a monthly average player base of 734, with a peak player count of 7,482. Compare this with Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) – the game Lawbreakers’ publisher, Nexon, blames for its IP’s failure – and you’ll see why these numbers are so drastic.
Just last month, PUBG’s steam monthly average was close to 1.6 million, with a peak player count of around 3.2 million. Even now, PUBG continues to have a massive monthly average, with a player base of 1,426,652. Keep in mind, that doesn’t even take into account the games recent Xbox One release.
The fact that there are a multitude of other very popular FPS out in the current market, like PUBG, certainly plays a role in people not playing the game. Yet even a saturated market shouldn’t have that much of an effect on the game considering how many free weekends Boss Key has run for the game.
In the six months since its release, the Lawbreakers has had free to play weekends in November, September, and January. Each time, fewer players have shown up.
It’s hard to tell exactly where the game went so wrong, especially with such an experienced game designer in Cliff Bleszinski at the helm. According to our review, done by Jeremy Monken, “all of the machismo and desperate branding and demand that players be the most skilled just signal that this game wanted so desperately to be what it failed to be: A viable eSport.”
