LawBreakers publisher blames PUBG for the game’s failure

At this point you could put bets on what reason you think made LawBreakers flop. The hero shooter, which launched for PC and PlayStation 4 in August, released to a tepid response. While some people pointed to Overwatch and the lack of an Xbox version for the game doing poorly, LawBreakers’ own publisher has a different opinion… Nexon is blaming PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the game’s lack of success (via Eurogamer).

There is a $32.6 million expenses hole in Nexon’s latest financial results, a majority of which was meant to be filled by LawBreakers. With investors wanting answers, Nexon financial executive Shiro Uemura pointed to PUBG.

“Our results in North America in the third quarter were below our outlook, mainly due to the sales from LawBreakers being below our expectations,” Uemura said.

“LawBreakers is a unique FPS developed for core users. We had very high expectations for its launch,” Uemura continued, “however, the timing of its launch turned out to be unfortunate, specifically the blockbuster PC online game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds came out right about the same time, making the market environment very tough for first-person shooters in general and for LawBreakers.”

While PUBG became an increasingly popular title over the summer, and recently hit 3 million concurrent users on Steam, this reasoning behind Uemura’s response is a bit flimsy. LawBreakers never gained widespread traction both before and after its release, with peak player counts hitting just over 7,000 during its beta on Steam. If you look at its statistics today on Steam, its peak player count over the last 24-hours was merely 49, not even hitting triple digits.

Cliff Bleszinski never ruled out an Xbox One launch in the game’s future, but it’s difficult to see that happening at this point.