The final update for Gearbox’s failed hero shooter Battleborn arrived last week, tweaking game mechanics slightly, fixing a few bugs, and adding some new skins and taunts before closing the door on continued development. It did not have a good run.
As announced in September, the fall update for Battleborn is its last dose of new content. Servers will remain operational for the foreseeable future, but development is done. Those still playing the game can now dress several characters up in Borderlands skins, perhaps a reminder that Gearbox makes popular games as well.
Battleborn is not a bad game. When it launched back in May of 2016, it had a lot going for it – cool characters, solid combat mechanics and an interesting setting. It was repetitive and needed a lot of fleshing out, but the potential was there. But in order to reach that potential it needed players, and what might have been the audience for Gearbox’s big game was too busy playing Blizzard’s Overwatch, also released in May of 2016, to care.
The few fans the game did manage to garner cared very much about Battleborn. In November of last year, a group of fans organised a special event aimed at bringing new players to the game. While the “Battleborn Day” event didn’t have much of an effect on player population, it served as a testament to the passion of the game’s fans.
Gearbox’s official efforts to get new players into Battleborn didn’t fare much better. Rumours of the foundering game going free-to-play surfaced in September of 2016, mere months after launch. Though the rumours were denied at the time, the game did go partially free-to-play in June of this year, causing a brief jump in player numbers that fell off sharply a month after.
Though no concrete data is available for the console versions of the game, Battleborn‘s sad decline can be followed via the monthly player number totals for the PC version, as presented by Steamcharts.
Battleborn is still playable for the time being, but I wouldn’t bother. Gearbox is moving on to bigger and hopefully more successful things and the player base continues to dwindle. The fall update isn’t the final nail in its coffin – that box was sealed months ago. It’s the last handful of dirt before the shovelling begins in earnest.
Comments
12 responses to “Battleborn Updates Are Over, So It Can Die In Peace”
How can something die if it never truly lived?
Aborted?
Here’s to the dead already.
Hurrah for the next one who dies!
I’m looking at you Lawbreakers.As in comedy, timing can be nearly everything.
How many more failures can Randy Pitchford wear?
Might be a tad harsh, but I am slightly pleased to see this crash and burn in the way it has following on from the absolute pile of poo they dropped on the public that was Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Gearbox’s name and reputation was severely damaged from that debacle and I doubt they’ll ever truly reach the heights of their popularity following on from Borderlands 2.
Now for Cliff to finally admit his game is dead and buried.
As much as I love to laugh at Battleborn jokes, watch the Dear Bosman series for some beauties https://youtu.be/1KKUUgoV3JA, according to Randy Pitchford it sold millions and made a profit. He is right that success in the public eye is often dependant on arbitrary and inappropriate goals; however, as a magician and video game salesman, it’s difficult to know how much he can be believed.
Overwatch had nothing to do with Battleborn’s demise. I remember playing the beta at Pax and whilst it had promise it terribly lacked balance. Try the game later in the extended beta period and nothing was fixed.
Battleborn died because it wasn’t good
I bought the digital version on a special that dropped it down to $5.
I want my five bucks back, plus all the download I wasted on it. And my time.
I was told that great characters and story made up for the garbage MOBA-like mechanics, but it turned out they were the worst part. The game’s story felt like it was written by a 2-edgy-4-u high school improv class. It was fucking awful.
But it had a giant robot that thought he was a spider!
Maybe Randy Pitchford needed to siphon more money from another project to make this game good like he did with borderlands and colonial marines lol.
Randy Pitchford and Cliffy B should get together and make a game studio called “we’re full of it come buy our shitty games”