Cliff Bleszinski announced at a GDC panel that his title LawBreakers is not going to be free-to-play anymore. It appears that
We didn’t really want to go down that well of buying energy or a lot of the sleazier techniques that feel like they’ve taken over a lot of free-to-play. A lot of core gamers still have this wincing reaction when you suggest that something’s free-to-play, because they feel like they’re going to get ripped off.
Art director Tramell Isaac added that this free-to-play model distracted the studio from the development. Rather than thinking about making the game even better, developers had to think about their income.
At the end of the day, there’s got to be a halfway point between completely free-to-play and sleazy, and $60, day one, disk-based.
Bleszinski also presented the new look of the title, which would be more “M-rated” in its aesthetic compared to the more T-rated stylings of Overwatch and Battleborn.
Being constantly compared to the current slew of colourful shooters on the market made us realise we needed to stand out from the crowd. We decided to take a step back and explore how we could dial up the maturity in LawBreakers, going back to our original vision. The new look and feel embraces the innovative and vertical nature of our game elevated by violence, intensity and competition.