Lawbreakers, the
new competitive first-person shooter for PC and PlayStation 4 from Cliff
Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions, is apparently struggling
to find an audience. According to Steam, there’s only about two to three
hundred concurrent players on the PC every day, and that’s nowhere near enough to
support this kind of effort. Analyzing how this occurred, and how to fix it,
should provide some useful tips for developers.
What Went Wrong?
First off, let’s be clear: My analysis of the situation is
entirely based on observations from the outside and guesswork. I don’t have any
direct knowledge of the development process for Lawbreakers, nor the studio, nor any of the people. So I could very
well be wrong in lesser or greater ways about this. However, while the problems
I identify here may not be true for this specific instance, they certainly are
true for a great many games these days.
First, I’ll venture a guess that this game was developed
without a great deal of consideration for marketing, nor with any experienced
marketer as part of the team. That’s typical of many indie/small game studio
projects – marketing is not seen as something essential to developing and
making money from a game. Usually the focus is on design, programming, and art.
Consideration for marketing comes much later, usually as the game nears
completion. This is a mistake, since marketing efforts will often be more effective
with more time to take hold.
Lawbreakers
started off with additional challenges – it’s a multiplayer game, for one
thing, and it’s based on reflexes. Now, those are not bad things – in fact,
some of the most popular games around share those qualities. (Look at League of Legends, for instance, or Overwatch.) But when you need a group of
players in order to play, it makes it harder to get started – especially if
you’re trying to keep people in the same skill range. That’s why many such
games have chosen to be free-to-play – it maximizes the audience by removing a
major barrier to play (the up-front cost). Still, you can be successful with an
upfront cost – Overwatch has done
quite well indeed while charging up front for the game.
Note, though, that Overwatch
started with a huge advantage – Blizzard’s massive audience. Blizzard could,
very cheaply, notify tens of millions of people who love Blizzard games that
Blizzard has a new game – which they did, months ahead of launch, thus building
up plenty of anticipation and initial purchases. This crushed Battleborn (developed by Gearbox Games) which
could not compete against Overwatch
despite being supported by 2K’s marketing.
Another challenge for Lawbreakers
is the very competitive market segment that it’s entered. As noted, we have
games like Overwatch, and Battleborn, and Titanfall, and arguably related games like Destiny and Call of Duty
and others… there are plenty of well-funded, popular competitors that have big
installed bases of players. When you’re entering a market segment like that,
ideally you’d like to have some significant game features that provide a huge
competitive advantage (something players really want but can’t get elsewhere),
or a very strong license (like Star Wars
or Marvel), or a massive amount of marketing money (and talented marketers who
can devote plenty of time to this). Lawbreakers,
apparently, didn’t have any of these qualities. More than that, you’d really
want to have a strong marketing strategy, and start work building your audience
(that is, marketing your game) very early on – soon after you start actually
developing the game, in fact. This, to all appearances, wasn’t really done,
either.
Fixing the Future
The really important question now for Lawbreakers is this: What can be done now to boost the game’s sales
to where it needs to be? Marketing alone may not be the answer, but determining
that starts with analyzing the data from the existing Lawbreakers audience. Are
only a trickle of new players showing up to play the game? Then you have to
figure out ways to bring in many, many more players – and considering a
free-to-play version is one possible answer. Are players abandoning the game
after playing a little while? Then you need to figure out why – is it that the
game is too frustrating to play? Are newbies killed too easily by the pros?
Does it take too long to find a match? Analyzing that is critical.
Marketing by itself may not be able to cure all of Lawbreaker’s problems. There may well be
game balance issues, or playability issues, that need to be dealt with by the
development team. Marketing can help inform some of those decisions with
surveys and focus groups, if need be. But the first place to start for Boss Key
is to look at all the player data they have now, and analyze that for clues
about how to improve the game.
Even with the game adjusted to its best performance, it
still may lack enough distinctive features to be an effective competitor in the
marketplace (that appears to be Battleborn’s
primary problem). Marketing can still help the game reach its full potential,
but ultimately the potential for a game is determined by its design. That said,
marketing can help – if there’s sufficient budget and skilled marketing talent
available. Good marketers can evaluate the situation and set performance goals
to see if marketing spending is working.
In a
recent interview Bleszinski said they are overhauling the marketing of the
game, and looking for a long-term build up similar to Warframe. That requires a steady commitment to improvements and
additional content, among which Boss Key says is overhauling the onboarding
experience of the game.
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