Radical Heights Isn’t Exactly Off To the Greatest of Starts

Boss Key Productions has been trying – feverishly – to recover from the disaster that was LawBreakers, and it’s managed to do that with the surprise launch of a new Battle Royale style game earlier this week, going under the name Radical Heights. The company, led by industry legend Cliff Bleszinski, was hoping to recover from that previous disaster and get its foot in the door with other competition like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite, utilizing a wacky 80’s motif and a money-saving system to make its game unique.

Alas, as flashy as the game is, it’s not entirely winning people over. An online report has suggested that the game’s first 24 hours on Steam have been rather bumpy, only drawing in a concurrent player count of just 8,500. That barely averages out to over 1,000 more than what LawBreakers managed to garner in its launch.

Considering that Radical Heights is a free-to-play game, and one that enables players to try it out on the house, you’d think there would be more interest. However, there are two general things working against it.

First, the surprise launch. This pretty much came out of nowhere, and players couldn’t get prepared for it, much less ween themselves away from their favorite Battle Royale games. Plus, that means less time to convince friends and others to give the game a try with you.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, a lot of players are still feeling burned by what happened with LawBreakers. That game never managed to garner a huge audience, and also burned players with its $30 entry price. Most people have since become skeptical of Boss Key, and, despite its innovation with this new title, aren’t willing to get burned again after what they went through.

Now, we could be wrong. The game did get some decent viewership on Twitch, with 120,000 concurrent viewers across many popular streamers. But whether they can keep that up for the long haul remains to be seen, especially as some players may feel like they’re being burned by the controversial money-saving system.

And it also doesn’t help that the game is undergoing some technical issues to boot. The official Radical Heights Twitter account posted the following message below, indicating that the team is looking into problems.

Radical Heights could easily bounce back if the team makes certain moves behind-the-scenes and tries to effectively build up more hype for it. But, as it stands, Boss Key might be on the verge of repeating history, unless the game has something to offer for the long haul.

Radical Heights is available now on Steam as a free-to-play game.

(Hat tip to EGM for the scoop!)