Cliffy B. Claims Politics Helped Destroy Boss Key Studio

Last we heard of ol’ Cliffy B, he was writing a book about his experience in games and the catastrophic failure of his independent studio, Boss Key Studio, which is noteworthy for being more or less un-noteworthy, releasing two games – Lawbreakers and Radical Heights, neither of which set the world on fire – before being shut down rather anticlimactically.

There’s a lot of different reasons a game studio – or an individual game – can shut down, but in an Instagram post, Cliffy B identifies the exact reason his games failed: politics.

"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 hokey 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.

Um… okay. I can’t really think of a single game whose downfall could actually be attributed to politics. I mean crap: of all the games that raised the ire of the right-wing nuts who demand boycotts and changes, Lawbreakers and Radical Heights wasn’t even on their honorable mentions lists. No one noticed them enough to even care about their politics. And when you think of all the other “woke” games that are doing just fine, It seems… disingenuous.

He did post an update clarifying that he thought politics were just a factor, not the factor, but… is it really? Or is he just going down the same rabbit hole of dumbness that Markus Persson fell into?