Although LawBreakers was received positively following its August 2017 release, it underperformed commercially, leading the team to move on to develop a battle royale game instead of supporting LawBreakers in the long term.[4] Subsequently, Brussee left Boss Key Productions in December 2017, announcing that he had returned to Epic Games to work on an "exciting secret project".[5] The battle royale game, titled Radical Heights, was released in April 2018 as a Steam Early Access title, officially dubbed "X-Treme Early Access".[6] The game was received negatively by some critics, due to its very early state, and described as a mere "cash-in" in the light of the popularity of other battle royale games, such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite Battle Royale.[6]
On May 14, 2018, following the overall under-performance of both LawBreakers and Radical Heights, Bleszinski announced via Twitter that Boss Key Productions had shut down.[7] The studio previously had 65 employees as of September 2017.[8] According to Bleszinski, he did not take a salary for two years in order to pay for his employees so they "could care for their families."[9]
Following the success of the 2014 game Alien: Isolation, Boss Key had been in discussions with 20th Century Fox to make a first-person shooter game set in the Alien franchise, where the player would play as Newt, guided by Ripley, as she fought through xenomorphs in Earth-based labs where they were being studied by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, in a style similar to Half-Life series. However, the project had been shelved as a result of the merger of Fox into Disney.[10]
Media related to Boss Key Productions at Wikimedia Commons
United States
Video games
