Turns out Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski's mysterious tease about the future of his flopped FPS LawBreakers may have been a bit premature. Two weeks ago, he tweeted "Just got a text from my lawyers about… LawBreakers. Stay tuned" (before launching into a rant against people who "were rooting for the game to fail"), implying some kind of return for the now long-dead game. It's now looking like that was based on a misunderstanding of who holds the game's rights in 2023—a more recent tweet says "Well, turns out Nexon does own the rights to LawBreakers." before appealing to Nexon's CEO to DM him about a resurrection.
Nexon retaining the rights makes sense—they published the game when it originally launched in 2017. What's less clear is what incentive they'd have to bring back LawBreakers. Though it reviewed well (we gave it a very respectable 84%), it was a desperate flop commercially and ultimately killed Bleszinski's studio Boss Key Productions, making it a pretty unsafe bet. And he's not even offering to head up this hypothetical revival—he wants a 3rd party to work on it and hire him as a consultant. Which seems to me to be less of a business proposal and more like me wondering aloud whether Ubisoft might like to pay me for my 'Assassin's Creed during the Dutch tulip mania' outline.
