Boss Key Productions is officially out of business. In a statement early May 14, Cliff Bleszinski, the founder and CEO, put his company to rest. In an open letter to the community, Bleszinski outlined just how troubled the studio was. Ever since Lawbreakers released in August of last year to awful numbers, fans have known the studio was in trouble. However, until Bleszinski’s recent post, no one realized how dire things were.

It’s a bitter goodbye for Bleszinski, who started Boss Key Productions just four years ago. He had retired in 2012 from Epic Games, a company that he had helped bring to prominence. After being a key member of the Unreal series, he went on to work extensively on Gears of War. However, Bleszinski became frustrated when Epic Games stopped being receptive to his ideas. Boss Key Productions was to be his triumphant return to gaming, one where he didn’t have to ask permission to move ahead with his ideas, but that never worked out.

Lawbreakers was supposed to bring Boss Key to prominence, something Bleszinski went on record numerous times touting as a “billion dollar IP,” but Blizzard got in the way of this. Lawbreakers was to be a combination arena/hero shooter, something that brought in elements of Bleszinski’s history with Unreal into contemporary gaming. Unfortunately, Overwatch released a full year before Lawbreakers. With Blizzard spending millions – if not billions – promoting and turning the game into an esport, Lawbreakers had little chance. Tacked onto this were the numerous changes and issues the game had on its own.

The character designs were dated and lackluster. One of the centerpiece characters, Cronos, looked like a backup member of Slipknot. Nearly all the characters suffered heavily from boring and bland designs. Meanwhile, Overwatch embraced the far more accessible style of Team Fortress 2. High quality cartoony graphics appealed to all and held up well on a variety of systems, as we’ve seen with Fortnite as well. Lawbreakers could not say the same. It also suffered heavily from changes that made fans bitter, such as the fact that the game was promoted for years as a free-to-play and changed near the end of production into a typical price model. This led to some less than favorable reactions from the community.

Despite being a good arena shooter with positive reviews, Lawbreakers was dead in the water. The price tag of the game turned off the fans the game did had, and the unappealing aesthetics turned off everyone else. It has become more obvious now that the decision to price Lawbreakers was probably because of how badly the studio was bleeding money.

Less than a year after Lawbreakers release, Boss Key made one last ditch effort with Radical Heights. The game was a Battle Royale modeled after the success of Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto. It hoped to capitalized on the goofy fun of many games while adding in a good amount of 80s nostalgia and heavy gunplay. The game received mixed reviews, but for having a development that was a fraction of most games, the game was doing fairly well. Unfortunately, Radical Heights had only a single month on the market before Boss Key shut down. It’s likely that Boss Key was going under before Radical Heights was even released. The decision to release it so quickly was a last attempt to keep the company afloat.

At the end of the day, Boss Key actually made good games. Both its titles had favorable reviews in terms of gameplay. The problem was that the studio was simply mismanaged. Free-to-play models are more successful by far than traditional pricing models, but Boss Key failed to recognize this or capitalize on it. Lawbreakers was a game poorly designed for skins and loot boxes – the two biggest ways to make money on online games, and the game would have had time to create an audience if it hadn’t added a last minute price tag. It’s a sad day for Bleszinski, but a good reminder for future devs of what it takes to make it in 2018.