It seems everyone wants to play addictive Battle Royale games these days, with Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds still attracting reasonably sized audiences. That said, Boss Key Studios’ Cliff Bleszinski wants his team’s game to reach out to a new audience. But the question is…what kind of success will it find?
Bleszinski recently had a conversation with Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb on Twitter, where his team was complimented on the style of its Battle Royale game Radical Heights.
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Hryb said, “BTW: Nice work on Radical Heights! It speaks to my 80’s inner child.” To which Bleszinski quickly noted, “We want it on Xbox.”
Now, we’ve seen Boss Key Studios make a deal to bring its games to console before, as LawBreakers arrived on PlayStation 4 at the same time as PC. However, that game failed to connect with an audience, forcing the team to scramble on its Radical Heights project.
Now, it would make for an ideal exclusive for Xbox, but there are a couple of things to consider.
First off, Microsoft already has a deal in place with a leading Battle Royale game. The team signed on with Bluehole and PUBG Corp. to bring PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to the Xbox One late last year, where it has sold millions of copies, despite being in a slightly unfinished state. And with a new map coming this month, it’s likely to continue.
But then there’s Radical Heights itself. Earlier today, we reported that the game has lost a good chunk of its PC audience, going from 12,500 concurrent players at launch to around 2,200 players. It’s a free-to-play game, so this seems like a bitter pill to swallow.
That’s not to say Radical Heights can’t bounce back, but it needs to find a bigger PC following before Boss Key should consider a move over to console — and Microsoft is probably waiting to see what happens with that. The question is if the game can reach such, ahem, heights again.
In the meantime, we should probably expect some kind of new PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds announcement around E3 time, as well as a few AAA-related Battle Royale game debuts, like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Battlefield V. We’ll see what happens around E3 time.
Radical Heights is available now for PC.
