Ever since the studio closed I’ve been wracking my brain what I could have done differently. Pivot HARD when the juggernaut of Overwatch was announced. Been less nice with my design ideas and more of a dictator with them.
One big epiphany I had was that I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided.
Instead of the story being “this game looks neat” it became “this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms.” Instead of “these characters seem fun” it was “this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier.” Instead of “who am I going to choose” it became “white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews” instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.
It’s okay to be political when your company or studio is established for great product FIRST. But we were unproven and I regret doing it. (This will be quite the doozy of a chapter in the upcoming memoir.)
It can’t take all or even most of the blame for the title’s failure, but the GG gamerbro crowd is still pretty toxic and reactionary.
I honestly don’t think I ever heard or saw any of the complaints Cliff mentioned in his post. I’m not disputing they they happened. I just think they were a drop in the bucket of all the other complaints I saw.
Heh. I can relate to this, for I have been there. The road less traveled can be a fascinating and worthwhile journey, but there’s a reason it is less traveled.
I’ve definitely heard/seen some gamerbros bitching about 99% of the initial roster of Apex Legends being white (just the “bad” guy) being “diverse” and THAT game is doing well, isn’t it?
“My games don’t do well because I’m so principled,” is a very comforting thought.
I really didn’t hear much about the political leanings of his game at the time because I avoid the sorts of places where people complain about that stuff, but I’m sure it was there. That said I find it very hard to believe that was a substantial contributing factor to the game failing. From all I’ve seen, Lawbreakers was actually an excellent title that just failed to find an audience, probably because it was buy to play.
Yeah; I generally loved Cliff’s games, but I was never going to be onboard with Lawbreakers because of the type of game it was.
Well, it was a multiplayer hero shooter, with a relatively high skill floor, that wasn’t free to play, and the heroes were kinda generic when compared to Overwatch which came out a year beforehand.
High skill floor means it’s difficult to pick up, buy to play is a barrier to start, and generic heroes are simply inferior. The fact that past all that it was (supposedly) a great game didn’t save it.
They should have relaunched F2P. In fact, that should have been in their business plan as a contingency the entire time. If the title blows up and is fantastically successful at launch, keep on keepin’ on. Otherwise, activate plan B.
Clearly he’s figured it all out and his next venture will be super successful.
The initial roster for Apex Legends was two black women, a samoan/islander dude, a woman (we think?) in a mask, a robot, a white woman, a white man, and a mixed race dude.
I have no idea what you’re talking about with that comment. It’s confusing.
Since then we’ve gotten a latino guy, an asian guy, a white woman, and a white guy that’s actually just his brain in a robot body.
It’s pretty diverse. The only complaints I’ve seen is that it’s leaning male, but the character expected next is a portuguese woman, so there you go.
I’m saying the dudebros complained Apex was TOO diverse, TOO woke with no “white males” representing them.
One thing that’s hard for me to get my head around, is that I just don’t care about this stuff.
The gender of the characters in Apex is entirely immaterial to me. I play them primarily for their abilities, with their “character” as a sometimes amusing afterthought. Most of the time I play the genderless robot… second most common is bangalore.
Maybe in a game where there’s an actual story, but a shooter like Apex? My mind doesn’t associate any kind of meaningful storyline with it at all.
Ah… ok… I think that’s what Cliffy is saying hurt his game, so yeah, he’s probably not really right about that. I didn’t even try Lawbreakers tbh and I try or play heavily a lot of first person shooters. I think the bigger issue was there was nothing really to set it apart from other games. Sure, the movement was kind of unlimited, but that just makes it really hard to learn how to play well.
He’s right too that once Overwatch was coming, he was on the back foot. That sort of a release sucks all the air out of the room unless you have something really special. Of course in 2020 a Lawbreakers that played just like Overwatch but didn’t feature anything with regard to China would probably be a huge hit.
The personalities of the Apex cast are part of the appeal for me. I like the character chat. I’ve also enjoyed the cinematic trailers they’ve produced and the lore that goes along with it. The game’s setting makes it easy to have diversity, too. It’s way out in the cosmos even though Earth is a thing in the Titanfall universe. It has just enough of the familiar combined with all the sci-fi to make it approachable. What I remember of Lawbreakers is that it was mildly impenetrable as a fiction. It had zero soul.
I didn’t understand the title and I didn’t understand the post linked either. I am not literate enough probably.
“Since Core Gamers are universally racist incel shitfucks [ed: not untrue], my game that consciously featured people of color and women in the main cast triggered too many of them and they didn’t want to buy from a big SJW like me.”
–Cliff Blizzardzinfandel, a man of [ed: highly questionable] Liberal Principles
Thank you @:D
But yeah, living in Epic’s backyard and knowing more than a few devs and ex-devs in the area, I have a hard time taking anything that goober says seriously. He’s searching for excuses and trying to stay relevant. It’s sad, tbh.
Wasnt LawBreakers the Overwatch clone that wasnt as good as Overwatch, released after Overwatch was already popular and before everyone was bored of Overwatch? and wasnt Overwatch even woker and yet one hundred times more popular?
Cliff, meet irrelevancy, irrelevancy, meet the early 2000s.
Ya, it came out about a year after Overwatch. It must have sucked, because by the time Overwatch came out, it would have been hard to totally revamp the game to not be so similar.
I dunno how “woke” overwatch was though.