But Boss Key won’t do it
Ever since Cliff Bleszinski announced he was working on an arena shooter, it has had “PC-only” in most people’s minds. It’s definitely PC first and foremost, but that doesn’t mean that it’s restricted to PC. Bleszinski’s very much open to the idea of it coming to consoles if the circumstances are right.
In a recent interview with us, we talked to Bleszinski about LawBreakers‘ gameplay and free-to-play structure, but we also touched on the possibilities of the game coming to consoles. “People are like ‘You’re never coming to console,’ and I’m like ‘I never said that,'” Bleszinski told us.
But, Bleszinski’s adamant that his studio, Boss Key Productions, is too small to handle a console version. Someone else would have to do it. “We’re 40 people. Even if we wanted to do a console version, we couldn’t right now,” Bleszinski commented. “If one of those potential console partners (Sony or Microsoft) reaches out — and they reach out all the time — we meet with them, and let’s keep the dialogue going. It’s just that we wouldn’t be able to do the port ourselves. We’d need a really great partner that could knock it out of the park, keep it 60Hz, nail the controls, and make it fantastic.”
Consoles might seem like an odd destination for LawBreakers, as its roots are firmly planted as a keyboard and mouse shooter. Bleszinski originally thought so too, but realized that there may not be many necessary concessions for it to come to consoles.
Bleszinski elaborated on this realization by saying “Some of the Epic engineers came over and we had a conversation where I was like ‘Good luck porting this to consoles.’ One of them looked at me and said ‘Titanfall‘s crazy wall-jumping, wall-running, and verticality, and that works on PC and console.’ With the right amount of aim-assist and the right amount of little tricks, I could see it working. I wouldn’t want to do the cross-platform play, though. I don’t think the effort’s worth the outcome there.”
Any amount of success for LawBreakers doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough for Bleszinski and Boss Key to take on any sort of console port. He wants to stick to that size of 40 employees. “I want to keep the company as small as humanly possible. There may be a time where if this becomes League of Legends big, fingers crossed, where we would need to grow, but that would be a few years out. That would be a best-case scenario. That would be a very good problem to have, but if that’s the case, the first 40 to 50 employees will be very happy because we will have crushed it. But, we’re going to stall as long as we can on that.”
Bleszinski justified this mindset by saying “The bigger a company gets, the more accountability happens, the more things get overthought. When that happens, creativity suffers. I’m not saying great things can’t come out of big companies, but I’m saying that it’s harder than in small companies.”
