LawBreaker Studio's New Battle Royale Game Accused of Being Pay-to-Win

Boss Key Productions is having a rough time of it. Their first big game, LawBreakers, didn’t so much make a splash when it first arrived as much as it sort of landed on some hard dirt with an ungraceful thud. The game was fine, but it was trying to compete with Paladins, Dirty Bomb, Overwatch, and of course, PUBG. This meant that it didn’t have much room to breathe… especially with a $30 price tag. It’s been doing less-than-good, and Boss Key even admitted in a blog post that they need to do something dramatic to save themselves from ruin.

So of course they’re making a freaking battle royale game.

The game, called Radical Heights, is set to launch in early access on Steam very soon, and compared to other Battle Royale Games, it doesn’t offer very much. Its big distinction is that you earn cash in-game as you play, which you can either spend on customization, or, if you rush to an ATM in a match, you can withdraw it to buy weapons. The big issue with that, however, was that if you decided to buy the $15 founder's pack for this otherwise free game, you’d start out with 10,000 bucks, giving you a massive advantage over enemy players. And that’s on top of the 10 percent money boost you apparently receive as well.

Concerned fans called Boss Key Productions out on this, and in response, they removed the $10,000 cash starting bonus from the founder’s pack, and clarified that the 10 percent money bonus applied after a match, so founders wouldn’t be earning more money in the middle of a match than anyone else. It still gives them a tangible advantage, of course, but… not as much of one.

Still, it’s a bad sign that this game’s first big piece of publicity is a pay-to-win controversy. We’ll have to see if Boss Key can weather the storm.