Boss Key Productions Has Effectively Shut Down

Boss Key Productions, the studio started by Cliff Bleszinski in 2014, has effectively shut down. This news comes by way of Bleszinski’s Twitter, where he posted a short letter on Monday, detailing why the studio has decided to close its doors and what he plans to do in the immediate future.

A statement: pic.twitter.com/LwJD54bCwL

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 14, 2018

He does not go into much detail about the ins and outs of the closure, but he acknowledges that the lack of success and player retention in the studio’s games played a key role in the matter. The servers for Radical Heights, Boss Key’s answer to the battle royale genre, will remain online for an unspecified amount of time. Their game prior to Radical Heights, Lawbreakers, showed well at trade shows, but did little in the actual market, money- or player-wise. However, it is sad to see this studio go. Both games had nuggets of potential and some genuinely good ideas, and Bleszinski has become a household name in the world of videogames.

Yet, the closure of a studio does not just affect one person. It ripples unilaterally through every employee and condolences to all of them. Hopefully, more will come out about the studio’s closure in the next few weeks and months. Videogame developers are an understanding community and usually rally around layoffs when a whole studio goes under, and everyone affected by the Boss Key closure will hopefully land back on their feet.

In the meantime, it seems fitting enough to once again exclaim that game developers, like any working force, deserve to unionize. This is by no means a comment on the studio environment at Boss Key, for not much is known about the inner workings of the studio, but it is just merely a universal claim that will hopefully become a reality sooner rather than later.

Those who worked at Boss Key, hopefully, had advance knowledge of the studio’s closure and received the benefits that they deserved. In the wake of this, game companies via Twitter are coming out with job applications in the hope that those left wayward after Boss Key’s closure can find a new home.