Boss Key follows LawBreakers with entry into battle royale

Boss Key will follow the commercial disappointment of LawBreakers with Radical Heights, its own entry in the burgeoning market for battle royale games.

The reveal for Radical Heights, which is set in game-show with an irreverent 80s aesthetic, arrives just a few days after Boss Key said it had stopped working on LawBreakers to focus on new projects.

As such, Radical Heights is still relatively early in development, but Boss Key has elected to release the game on Steam Early Access today.

"Radical Heights is a five month passion project for the studio, as we're creating and publishing the game entirely by ourselves," said Radical Heights creative director Zach Lowery in a statement.

Radical Heights is free-to-play, the model that LawBreakers abandoned in favour of a premium price during the course of its development. Indeed, Boss Key conceded that "a pivot to free-to-play may seem like easiest change to make" in terms of ensuring LawBreakers' survival, but it lacked the "publishing and planning resources to do it."

This may be due to Nexon's lack of faith in the project, after it failed to meet the publisher's commercial expectations. Despite being an investor in Boss Key, and despite attributing its poor performance to the breakout success of battle royale blockbuster PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Nexon has not signed on to publish Radical Heights.

However, the free-to-play is used by Fortnite Battle Royale, which had amassed more than 40 million players in January this year.