LawBreakers is a game that seemed to just come out at the wrong time, and under-performed as a result of this bad timing. In fact, the game performed so badly that the developer Boss Key had to shut down earlier this year. However, instead of letting things lie as they are, a former executive at publishing company Nexon decided to add insult to the injury of the game’s failure.
Nexon America’s former Vice President of Marketing, Vlad Coho, was scheduled be delivering a talk titled ‘LawBreakers: How I Blew Millions Marketing the Biggest Flop of 2017′ at DevGAMM in Seattle at the end of the month. Based on the title, we can assume that the talk was going to be about what a mistake it was to bet on the game, and what he would have done differently.
Earlier this year, we learn that Nexon had faced some layoffs due to LawBreakers’ failure. Perhaps that is something Coho’s talk was going to dive into? It still seems in bad taste to phrase the talk in such way that insults a former partner. Clearly, this is something Coho eventually realized as well, because Destructoid now reports that the DevGAMM talk has been cancelled.
“I have a ton of respect for the Boss Key Productions team,” Coho told Destructoid. “Games are a risky, difficult business even when everything goes well, and BKP did their best. My talk was going to be about my lessons learned from the mistakes I made, not about what the devs could have done better or differently. That said, out of respect for the BKP team, I’ve pulled the talk and won’t be mentioning LawBreakers or Nexon if/when I do speak at DevGAMM.”
Based only on the title of the talk (since we can’t possibly know what the actual content would have been), it seemed pretty apparent that a large part of it would have been about kicking something when it’s already down, so it’s good to see, at the very least, that that’s not going to happen anymore. What are your thoughts on this? Tell us in your comments.