Well that was quick.
Did they find someone to buy them out or did they really think Radical Heights would have saved the studio on such a short time scale? Didn’t they JUST have some big tournament thing?
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This should have been expected. They did NOT make enough money with any of their games, Radical Heights was released to early, the game was not even close to being finished, but they really needed the money so I guess they had to push it out… 
Anyway, didn’t seem TOO interesting, even lawbreakers was a meh, Imo.
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Guess it was expected, no-one really gave any attention to their games. Sad tho
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“failed to find an audience thanks in large part to an oversaturated marketplace”
this is what happens when chasing trends…
this has been a constant industry factor for decades… there is a reason games trying to emulate CoD didn’t do “as well”, (despite CoD maybe not being the greatest thing on earth), -or Minecraft, etc etc etc…
those consumer bases already had their needs met with what was already there… you need something “more” than sugar to make people switch to another brand of cornflakes…
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y, it’s pretty weird how they just spent like probably close to $150,000 on a tournament just a week ago
no they just closed down man, all employees are out of a job just like that, maybe now he’ll be cool with his ex-employees trying to find work with Epic?
It could have if it had become insanely popular immediately (look how much money ppl pump into fortnite monthly; it’s insane - they made $126 million in February alone, and they make more than $1 million per day on mobile alone! [talking about money, Ninja is making more than $1 million a month too now, what a world we live in]) but that didn’t happen, as we all know.
I’m too heartbroken to type this out again, so here’s a quote:
This really was a case of “we need Fortnite now, or else.” The moment the “or else” happened, half the studio jumped ship to other companies early with a mix of poaching and developers just trying to keep their careers. They really sunk EVERYTHING into LawBreakers.
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Was on twitter and saw Kempington (Streamer) post about this, its quite sad news to hear about, but also understandable since RH numbers dropped a lot of players just like there last game Lawbreakers did. wish the people out of work over there good luck.
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Not for nothing, but if they had actually put a proper tutorial into Lawbreakers regarding movement in the zero-G, people might have actually stuck with it long enough for it to get some legs. They didn’t, people were confused as hell about how to get around in the game, and they stayed away in droves.
As for Radical Heights, if you’re going to try and pull off a fast-follow on a trend, you need to get that thing out the door in a playable condition and have it be better than the original. Yes, PUBG was a buggy mess that played like hot garbage on even the beefiest of machines on release, but that doesn’t give Boss Key carte blanche to put out a half-baked clone in a barely functional state. Fortnite plays on mobile phones while still looking good, for crying out loud. If you’re going to be the third man out of the gate, you better bring your A-game, and they didn’t.
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@techparadox If they had waited, they would have closed down earlier with nothing, most likely. They at least had the gameplay on point, even if the servers were a bit janky for a day.
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They launched the game on April 10th, they didn’t have the cash to keep the studio afloat for more than a month after the launch. How do you even calculate that budget and figure you’ll give it a go? I can’t see what they were hoping would happen. Yes fortnight is hugely successful now but they certainly were not pulling in any money on it the first month.
Only thing I can imagine is that they thought they’d manage to get some investors on board, but even that seems like an exceptionally short time frame to work with.
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Yes, but Fortnite and PUBG were raking in massive profits in a very short time. They probably didn’t calculate it. They probably had enough to keep the studio open for two months or so and crunched out a release version they could build on. A lot of fans are saying that “Patch 3 could have saved it!!!” and while it did sound great, I highly doubt that anything could save BKP at this point. The writing seems to have been on the wall since LB1.3, even if I didn’t want to read it.
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guys i’m pretty sure the 150k they blew on that tourney could have kept them going for a few months at least and allow them to push out some more patches wtf
why the hell would u blow 150k on a tourney if that is that!!!
i wouldn’t even be surprised if someone will press charges because of that shit even, it’s like a shotgun to the company’s face
i for one don’t believe there’s any possible patch that would suddenly have brought in hundreds of thousands of players though
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Well I don’t know how long PUBG was in development before they went into early access, but I’m pretty certain it was more than 2 months. They had the benefit of being somewhat unique. Fortnite was certainly in development for a lot longer than that and while they seemed to have cranked out the battlegrounds version rapidly they already had a base game to work with. They also capitalised greatly on people being tired with PUBG and being the first free to play variant.
Radical heights had none of these things going for it, their optimism for this project seemed so unwarranted it’s ridiculous or downright irresponsible.
Not really no, maybe a week or two. It would have been better spent giving your employees a little longer to find somewhere else to work than what they chose to do at least.
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5-6 for Radical
there’s no way it cost them 300k a month to run their studio man, u rly think a small studio costs $3.5 million/year to run???
Yeah when you’re doing it in San Francisco and it’s not a small studio, they had 65 employees and they’d like to get payed enough to also be able to live in SF. $150k doesn’t go that far.
Edit: Nevermind, it seems they were actually based in Raleigh, NC. So living costs were probably a lot lower. Though I don’t know anything about that place.
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hm k yr right i had no idea they had so many employees; that makes me wonder how many Epic have, have u seen at what rate they push out new content on Fortnite??? new weapons, skins, dances, emotes all the time, and top notch too, + map changes etc. I don’t play Fortnite often at all, but i’m rly impressed by how they keep updating their game continuously and with such quality content
That constant support comes from all of their other games. Epic has AAA resources at their disposal, and Fortnite BR’s support came from canning every single one of their other projects. Paragon was outright shut down, UT2014 is “in development” (not really), and Fortnite PvE has been reduced to a button you occasionally accidentally click when launching Fortnite BR.
Also, for a project with such a short development time, Radical Heights was impressive. The hitreg felt great, many of the mechanics felt very polished, and it clearly just needed a little more time for the artistic implementation and character customization to catch up. Now, this will never happen.
With my track record (cough Metal Gear Survive), I’m pretty sure everyone on this forum could have guessed that “hey, here’s that game everyone’s hating on… I bet CptMold really liked it.” Yeah, yeah I did.
Also, @Fraggles As somebody who’s played plenty of PUBG, it still kinda feels like it was developed in two months XD
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as someone that have never touched PUBG, and never will, and probably couldn’t dream of it with a 30foot pole either, -i’ll say RH still looked fun/better in comparison to whatever little i’ve watched
that said,
the problem, as i also see it, is to even a online mp shooter misanthrope like me these days, Fortnite still looks like the better game/more intriguing to play, so if i were to actually play one, it would have been Fortnite
RH just sorta seemed to me like what happened after WoW took off and made zillions, sure there were mmo’s before, and probably good ones after, but none that would either steal me away from WoW, or (so far) be the one that brought me “back in the fold” to mmo again these days…
which is probably a bit sad for RH, because they probably could have done something really well if they had either had the time, or (from the beginning) been able to truly put their own spin on and do something different enough to wow people about the battleroyale “genre”
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It’s really hard to feel sorry for a company that was dumb enough to think Radical Heights was a good idea.
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When you retire from the industry, the industry likes to welcome you back to that retirement. It’s happened to so many well known devs and CliffyB is the latest name to join the list. It’s almost like the more well known you are, the lower your chances of making a successful return become.
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