Boss explains how iconic Battleborn went down against Activision Blizzard and Overwatch – Admits stupid mistake

On September 14, 2022By Garmin Philip

Der Boss erklärt, wie das kultige Battleborn gegen Activision Blizzard und Overwatch unterging – Gibt dummen Fehler zu

In May 2016, Gearbox, the studio behind Borderlands, released the first-person shooter Battleborn for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. The game presented players with a weird squad of heroes: there were mushroom creatures, emo birds or crazy penguins. The well-produced shooter with the unique heroes flopped badly. The former 2K boss now explains what went wrong and what Overwatch has to do with it.

What game was Battleborn?

Battleborn was a weird game: it was a hero shooter with a cult-humorous sci-fi setting: an evil empire destroyed all the stars in the universe, only a coalition of heroes wanted to save the last star, Solus.
Players were able to play a PvE campaign where they were constantly being texted and insulted over the voice chat in a completely over-the-top manner.
But there was also a PvP variant, similar to Overwatch.

Battleborn was known for its powerful trailers:

How did the game go? Like Evolve, the previous “2k big hit”, Battleborn fared really badly after release:

The game only got a 69% on Metacritic, which is pretty weak
On Steam, it started rather moderately with 12,000 players on average, but dropped to 660 games within a few months
Developer Gearbox admitted early on that the game wasn’t selling well, but they still wanted to save it. But even a “free trial” in June 2017 could not stop the end. In October 2017 the game went into maintenance mode – in 2021 the servers closed completely.

Battleborn Is Dead – A Fan’s Obituary!

Activision Blizzard spent 10x more money than we did

Here’s what the boss says about what went wrong: In an interview with GameSpot Christoph Hartmann explains the problems, he was the boss of publisher 2K at the time.

For Hartmann, what it boils down to is that Battleborn went head-to-head with Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch and lost there.

You made the mistake of putting all your cards on the table too early.

In retrospect, the boss is annoyed that Battleborn was presented so early, already at E3 2014, which he now sees as a stupid mistake:

We were stupid enough to announce the game too early. We showed it at E3 way too early, years before release. We explained to the whole world what we were doing, and then we couldn’t deliver for ages. Activision Blizzard spent 10x more money on marketing than we did. We did a little bit, but clearly not as much as Overwatch.

Back then, information about Battleborn was constantly mixed up with information about other hero shooters

This is behind it: Hartmann explains exactly Battleborn’s problem at the time: The game was presented early and looked interesting: But there was no continuous marketing campaign for the game, you kept hearing something, but quickly forgot it.

It kind of felt like Battleborn would just slip out of players’ minds completely, only to come back for a brief moment: “Oh, that happened, right.”

Marketing for Battleborn mingled in players’ minds with information about a number of other “hero shooters” that also emerged between 2014 and 2016, most notably Overwatch.

Players kept asking themselves, “What’s this Battleborn again?” It was difficult for them to differentiate between Battleborn, Paladins, Lawbreakers, Paragon, and Gigantic – all sort of similar games, with a cast of exciting heroes. All shooters, all kind of playing in an arena – all were games that looked interesting and vie for attention.

Battleborn has some great trailers, my personal favorite is the trailer for E3 2015 – the song title is “Fitzpleasure – by alt-J”