Josh Rife, previously Senior Environment Artist at Boss Key Productions, confirmed over the weekend on Twitter that the LawBreakers servers have been shut down permanently.
He wrote: ‘Servers are officially closed for good. Hardest development, and best game I ever shipped. If you played it, thank you’.
The multiplayer first-person shooter has been plagued with problems since its launch in August 2017. Initially praised for its gameplay and combat styles in low-gravity arenas, the number of active players rapidly decreased.
Rather than attempt to promote LawBreakers, Boss Key Productions instead focused on the release of Radical Heights – the battle royale game – that was received negatively and seen as a way to quickly cash in on other battle royale games such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite Battle Royale.
Following the disastrous launch of Radical Heights, the announcement came in May 2017 that Boss Key Productions would be closing down. The very same day, the game went free-to-play on Steam while the PS4 version was still for sale at a cost of $29.99. New in-game purchases were stopped and the company stated no refunds would be issued and although the game was still available to play for a time servers would shut down for good on September 14th 2018.
For fans of the game it’s a sad end to a game that held so much promise at its launch, and a painful reminder that online multiplayer games rely heavily on an active and large fan-base if they’re going avoid a server switch off.