LawBreakers Concurrent Player Count on Steam Is Disappointing

Megalith

Megalith

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Steam stats suggest that Cliffy B’s anti-grav shooter is doing poorly, despite all of the marketing and good reviews: LawBreakers has struggled to pop over 400 concurrent players on Steam, peaking within the last 72 hours at 364 users, not a fifth of its launch numbers of 2000 players plus. This is particularly worrisome, being that the game is a multiplayer-only title.

Original plans were for the game to be a Free to Play product, but that changed to a retail release during development. I think it's a little early to do an about face and go free to play right now, you also run the risk of upsetting the early adopters who put down $30 and are playing the game. But something needs to be done to inject adrenaline into Boss Key Game's passion project. Sometimes games suffer unfavorably once they enter arenas already dominated by other titles, regardless of their own quality, (see 101 MMORPGs that aren't World of Warcraft,) and there's little that can be done about it, other than to cut your losses.
 
otherweeb said:
I would suggest there's so many MP games out there it's hard to secure audience. Maybe the MP bandwagon is full up.
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The market was saturated when Overwatch released and it was a huge success. The Problem with LawBreakers is it felt like a me too shooter. Also it is visually unimaginative like everything CliffyB has ever made.
 
When I first saw this game I assumed it was something that came out of South Korea.....looks about as generic as a game ever has, or like Unreal Tournament with all the cool Tournament modes taken out.....<shrug>. #Hater.
 
I somehow feel like there is a bit of vengeance/payback here from the PC gamers towards good ole CliffyB. :whistle:
 
Yeah, looked boring. Will not pay for boring FPS when games like Paladins: Champions are free to play and are quite a good distraction.
 
Game was a little tricky to get into, I ran beta tests for several months. I wasn't crazy about the feel and weight of the characters and movement that I voiced several times. It felt similar to unreal 2k4 if you are familiar with the less weighty feeling moving from ut99. After medium to high learning curve and fast time to kill one could say it's fairly punishing. Unlike overwatch it takes awhile to say you're having 'fun'. There were some balance issues before launch i'm not sure if they've patched out yet. I really wanted this game to be successful, as it represented the sub AAA studio with experience and talent to the teeth working on a for the most part passion project. I guess it just reminds me how much more of a niche these extreme twitch movement/mouse combo fps are despite years of success.

Unfortunately I would probably rather play the free (albeit limited) Unreal Tournament from EPIC n friends for an hour than Keep Grinding out the learning of each character in Law Breakers for the current price, beta having ended.


I think Overwatch is a lot easier to get into and while LB is targeting a more hardcore type gamer, they may have limited their niche market too much. I wouldn't be surprised if they make some drastic changes over the next year.

If you want a quick shooter to wind down on before bed it's not a bad game to check out, I just don't have any other friends that liked it enough to get a team going for it.
 
got a chance to try out the free beta...... definitely wasn't impressed by any stretch of any imagination....
 
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I mean I hate to say it, but I think right now it will be very hard for any FPS Multiplayer game to get users since Playerunknowns Battleground is basically the #1 game right now. I think it even has passed CS:GO which is no small task.
 
I played the beta right before release and was enough to confirm no purchase for me. It felt so clunky and wasn't really clear which characters were supposed to compliment each other. Felt more like you are on a team but really on your own type of game where the feel of it just didn't ever, well feel smooth. I expected better action from it and the maps felt super small.
 
Brackle said:
I mean I hate to say it, but I think right now it will be very hard for any FPS Multiplayer game to get users since Playerunknowns Battleground is basically the #1 game right now. I think it even has passed CS:GO which is no small task.
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Where are you getting your numbers from? PUBG has so much still wrong with it I'm not sure how their surviving.
 
Rahh said:
Where are you getting your numbers from? PUBG has so much still wrong with it I'm not sure how their surviving.
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Brackle said:
http://steamcharts.com/

I agree there is still tons wrong with it, but yes it has officially passed CS:GO.

even concurrent players it beat CS:GO.
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Not only did it beat out CS:GO, it did so while still being in Early Access.

So yeah, there are issues with the game, but it's pretty clear people don't seem to mind them.

LawBreakers, on the other hand? It peaked when they started the spurt of paying Twitch streamers to play it. Once that ended, their player base clearly plummeted.
 
I was hoping this would also allow either a single player or at least play with bots. I'm not the twitch online sniper I used to be during UT99 2K4 but I like to play causally. I also have a 9 year old who would love to play something like this but the online thing is out for him as language is an issue. He can almost beat me when we play 2K4 on the LAN. Even at $30 I just don't think I would get enough value. If it had a single player, I would have purchased.
 
Brackle said:
http://steamcharts.com/

I agree there is still tons wrong with it, but yes it has officially passed CS:GO.

even concurrent players it beat CS:GO.
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Perhaps it beat CS:GO but the #1 right now? Pretty sure Overwatch still smashing that one. None the less Lawbreakers didn't stand a chance with these releases.
 
Rahh said:
Perhaps it beat CS:GO but the #1 right now? Pretty sure Overwatch still smashing that one. None the less Lawbreakers didn't stand a chance with these releases.
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TBH I don't think Overwatch is even as popular as CS:GO. No way to verify it since Blizzard would never release the statistics. Now if it had more players then CS:GO or Dota I could see Blizzard announcing it then, but only because from a PR standpoint you want to tell everyone you are more popular then those 2.

Just my 0.02c
 
Game with uninsteresting characters, terrible marketing, and boring art design has no players. Also the game was supposed be to F2P, however now they want $30 for it, lol.

Anyone surprised?!? Nobody wanted this and it doesn't do anything exciting for people to care about.
 
Their mistake was not coming out before or near to the launch of Overwatch. Now Overwatch has so much momentum no one can compete in the same segment, just like a year after WoW was launched. If they were a competitor to Overwatch when Overwatch launched, the community would have split themselves between the two of the games.

I've been following it because I follow the former Planetside 2 guy on the team on Twitter. Even did one of the closed betas. Its just not my cup of tea, I would probably buy it if I had friends playing it (like PUBG), but that never happened.
 
I purchased it because I miss the Unreal/UT/Quake/Half Life/ Shogo era multiplayer. Simple jump in and play. No leveling up. Everyone has the same advantage in game. I work 15 hours a day most days. I do not have time to level characters, guns, skills, or whatever else is needed for many online games now.
I thought Lawbrakers would be an answer to that. I was wrong. The game is just not that fun to me.
Oh yeah, and no server browser. Hell I can't even choose what game mode I want to play.
 
EODetroit said:
Their mistake was not coming out before or near to the launch of Overwatch. Now Overwatch has so much momentum no one can compete in the same segment, just like a year after WoW was launched. If they were a competitor to Overwatch when Overwatch launched, the community would have split themselves between the two of the games.

I've been following it because I follow the former Planetside 2 guy on the team on Twitter. Even did one of the closed betas. Its just not my cup of tea, I would probably buy it if I had friends playing it (like PUBG), but that never happened.
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I don't buy your statement at all. A competent dev could absolutely make a new MMO to compete with WOW. In fact I clearly recall there was a Star Wars MMO years ago that directly lead to me cancelling my WOW subscription in order to switch over to Star Wars. That is literal and factual competition seeing as how I left WOW to move onto Star Wars. The issue you aren't grasping is that WOW is by far one of the highest quality and content packed MMOs that has ever been made. Another dev could absolute make a MMO that's just as good as WOW, it's not too late but it's a lot of work and very few devs are as good at making that type of game like Blizzard is. Making great MMOs is very difficult but not outside the realm of possibility.
 
As much as they touted movement, it felt borderline clunky to control yourself. The game looks bland, the skills feel bland, the guns feel excessively generic. Honestly, the whole time I played it, I just kept thinking "other games do this better, and it just feels like a bad combination of them".

Should have released as a free-to-play game to get any sort of popular following, 30$ is too much for what looks like icanmakeashooter2017part20
 
I feel like Lawbreakers would have done better if they had stuck with their original plans and kept it Free-to-play.
 
Well, we can say Overwatch has sold at least 30M copies. No data on how that translates to concurrent players though. It doesn't seem to be doing well as an eSport, at least initially, but that could change over time. It's certainly a popular streaming game.

PUBG has passed 8M copies sold, and various people have linked concurrency data.

Anyway, that's all an aside, none of it is Lawbreaker. 400 concurrent players is ... crappier than Battleborn when it released (I actually liked that game)

I honestly didn't even look into this game. It looked pretty generic from everything I saw about it. As far as shooters go, I think a lot of people are holding their breath for Destiny 2.
 
Who? What game that is the same as everything else I'm not interested in playing?
 
Needs characters to engage the entire market. I'll lend my services for free: Chubby but body positive Samoan with a tragic yet cute backstory, MAGA hat factory owner who gender identifies as an attack helicopter, Generic martial arts panda, I could go on...
 
Cliffy b stated that you need to be in the top three or in your multiplayer genre or your game is DOA. Heavily skill based shooters are never coming back in big numbers, he could have looked at what hi-rez already tried with a better game called tribes and failed miserably. Yet when they turned their attention to a casual moba (smite) and class based shooter (paladins) genre they had huge success. More people are playing cod ghosts on pc then lawbreakers right now. Im expecting the new quake champions and UT to follow a similar route.
 
Brian_B said:
Well, we can say Overwatch has sold at least 30M copies. No data on how that translates to concurrent players though. It doesn't seem to be doing well as an eSport, at least initially, but that could change over time. It's certainly a popular streaming game.

PUBG has passed 8M copies sold, and various people have linked concurrency data.

Anyway, that's all an aside, none of it is Lawbreaker. 400 concurrent players is ... crappier than Battleborn when it released (I actually liked that game)

I honestly didn't even look into this game. It looked pretty generic from everything I saw about it. As far as shooters go, I think a lot of people are holding their breath for Destiny 2.
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have both games. I dont play OW anymore because it got boring fast, but i am still loving PUBG.
 
It was fun, but I don't know if it's "$30 game" fun. There are so many other games for free anymore it makes it hard to justify spending one's scarce income on a game unless it's pretty exceptional.
 
Presbytier said:
The market was saturated when Overwatch released and it was a huge success. The Problem with LawBreakers is it felt like a me too shooter. Also it is visually unimaginative like everything CliffyB has ever made.
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Saturated? Overwatch? Sorry, but OW is unique, so there were 0 similar titles at launch.
 
prava said:
Saturated? Overwatch? Sorry, but OW is unique, so there were 0 similar titles at launch.
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The whole cartoon shooter market is cornered now. It may be "unique" but no one is going to be able to compete with another silly cartoon type shooter for a while. TF2 is still going strong and with OW being newer it will be hard to compete with both of these games. Even if the gameplay is different, it just won't catch on when these two games have such a huge base.
 
I don't know what's worse. The miner craze, where energy wasting is a form of income now. That creates gpu shortages, and inflated prices, Or the MMO/MOBA craze that sees most developers getting on the bandwagon creating uninspired run of the mill MP titles while completely ignoring the single player market.
 
M76 said:
I don't know what's worse. The miner craze, where energy wasting is a form of income now. That creates gpu shortages, and inflated prices, Or the MMO/MOBA craze that sees most developers getting on the bandwagon creating uninspired run of the mill MP titles while completely ignoring the single player market.
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So no one makes MMO anymore at all and this is a FPS areana shooter so it is not a MOBA or MMO.
 
Presbytier said:
So no one makes MMO anymore at all and this is a FPS areana shooter so it is not a MOBA or MMO.
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Honestly it's all the same for me. I thought FPS arena shooters had MOBA elements. Noone makes MMOs anymore? There are tons, or did they invent a new name and those games that all feel play and look like mmos to me again are called something else? Goes to show how much interest I have in online gaming.
 
M76 said:
Honestly it's all the same for me. I thought FPS arena shooters had MOBA elements. Noone makes MMOs anymore? There are tons, or did they invent a new name and those games that all feel play and look like mmos to me again are called something else? Goes to show how much interest I have in online gaming.
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MMO in the vein of Everquest, Ultima Online, Or World of Warcraft rarely get made anymore. You have seen some ports of Korean pay to win grindfests released in the west but there hasn't been a major western MMO in a real long time. AreanaShooter have been aroud since Quake. Their are a few that borrow some MOBA elements but they are pretty different.
 
Presbytier said:
MMO in the vein of Everquest, Ultima Online, Or World of Warcraft rarely get made anymore. You have seen some ports of Korean pay to win grindfests released in the west but there hasn't been a major western MMO in a real long time. AreanaShooter have been aroud since Quake. Their are a few that borrow some MOBA elements but they are pretty different.
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I thought Conan and ARK were MMOs. And the never ending story called star citizen is also supposed to be an MMO.
 
M76 said:
I thought Conan and ARK were MMOs. And the never ending story called star citizen is also supposed to be an MMO.
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Star citizen is not an MMO, and Age of Conan came out nearly a decade ago, unless you are referring to Conan Exiles which is a multiplayer survival game but not a MMO. I don't think Ark qualifies as a MMO either. It's just a bunch of small servers, more like mine craft with better graphics. Those games all lack the Massively in Massively Multiplayer Online, at most you have servers of 40 people not like MMO which can have several thousand. I'm not saying online games aren't made anymore my point earlier was MMO's aren't made anymore and the ones that do get released here are reskinned Korean games.
 
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