Just 15 months after the launch of Battleborn, Gearbox has announced their final update for the game. For a developer that has been so constantly steeped in praise – who else can tout a game with a 10/10 on steam? – it must have been a confusing feeling to release a game that didn’t so much flop as not make a splash at all.

Like Lawbreakers, which we previously covered here, Battleborn’s biggest problem was in its marketing. Battleborn launched just three weeks before Overwatch – a game which outclassed them in nearly every department but especially in budget. While Blizzard made sure every digital and physical surface on earth was plastered with Overwatch, Gearbox didn’t seem to make half the effort they did for Borderlands let alone try to compete with Blizzard.

Comparatively, each Borderlands trailer from the first game to the pre-sequel had a defined recognizable structure. They emphasized the flare and personality of the game through music first and foremost and action next. It was a brilliant marketing campaign, but Battleborn’s action and music seemed constantly out-of-sync and unsure of what they were which left gamers entirely unsure of what they were. It was never fully clear that Battleborn wasn’t an objective based FPS like Overwatch or TF2, but that it was a MOBA.

There were many mistakes with Battleborn – including some unfortunate similarities between characters with Overwatch – but Battleborn’s biggest problem was never figuring out what it wanted to be. User reviews cited the single and multiplayer options as being more confusing than enticing, and while the MOBA model has been challenged in the past by games like Smite, Battleborn wanted to add too many elements from the parts it pulled from, and most gamers were simply confused by the muddled end result.

Coupled with their recent blunder with doubling the price of We Happy Few and infuriating gamers, Gearbox is on shaky ground as a developer. For their sake, they had better knock their next title out of the park.