It isn’t too hard to find opinions of Lawbreakers, but the overwhelming majority of those opinions are that the game is exactly what it said it would be, and it’s quite good. Compare Lawbreakers to a similar flop – Battleborn – and Lawbreakers beats the game hands down in reviews but still never managed to get the kind of numbers Battleborn did. Battleborn launched with concurrent users hovering above ten thousand, whereas Lawbreakers struggled to get above one thousand despite being a much more polished game.

Many have said the issue is in comparing it to Overwatch, a game that has a similar hero-shooter premise but which is different in almost every other aspect. Lawbreakers is gritty and realistic, it calls back to the roots of arena shooters like Unreal, and it has a high skill cap and learning curve. None of those things are true of Overwatch, which is far more inspired by TF2 than arena shooters. For fans of the FPS genre, these are as different stylistically as an action RPG and a turn-based one.

Gamers have tried to decipher what went wrong with Lawbreakers. Youtuber CrowbCat made a 10 minute mash-up of the hype and presentation of Lawbreakers as well as many of the reviews and comparisons to it. It presented a possibility of oversaturation being the cause for failure, but we don’t think that is the case.

In the world of MOBAs, titles popped up left and right in the wake of League of Legends’ popularity, but a few stood out among the rest, and several still maintain solid fanbases. Smite survived by being different enough – the concept for story and characters as well as non-isometric view helped it set itself apart. Dota 2 presented itself as the hardcore version of LoL, which every MOBA fan agrees is true. The difficulty and skill cap of Dota 2 sets it apart.

So why hasn’t Lawbreakers been able to separate itself to create the same type of atmosphere Dota 2 enjoys?