Cliff Bleszinski’s now pining for the Fjords studio Boss Key Productions had a neat idea for a first-person shooter set in the Alien universe, but that plan got derailed when the House of Mouse rolled into town and bought 20th Century FOX.

Bereft of life, expired and having shuffled off the mortal coil, Boss Key Studios is now an ex-game development team.

Boss Key Studios co-founder Cliff Bleszinksi has been open and up front with the challenges that lay ahead for Lawbreakers, as he detailed how the overall vision for the game wasn’t to win a race, but rather a marathon that would draw in new players over time. This week the first such surge of content will be made available in the form of the All-Star Update.

Lawbreakers might just be one of the best shooters that few people are playing this year. Take a gander at the Steam charts, and the concurrent players for the Boss Key Studios debut game borders almost on non-existent. Which is baffling stuff, as Lawbreakers is a solid title with plenty of attitude, ideas and variety within its hero-shooter setup. So what’s the deal? Where’s the fanbase and how much do the numbers really matter in the long-term vision for Lawbreakers?

While Lawbreakers shares a few themes and ideas with Blizzard’s smash-hit hero shoot ‘em up, Lawbreakers does feel different in its approach to the genre. That’s because all actions come second to its primary gameplay, which focuses on popping guns before special abilities. Still, it’s a comparison that Lawbreakers studio Boss Key Productions and its big boss Cliff Bleszinski had have had to endure ever since the game was announced.

Grabbing the hottest writers, technology and at least one hit track from the seventies to be used in a trailer all adds up to one costly price tag at the end of the crunch. Sometimes it’s worth it, as franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield can pull in enough cash on a bad day to make indie developers cry themselves to sleep at night. Quite often, a gamble doesn’t pay out. Recent history is full of examples where a high budget didn’t translate into blockbuster sales or a warm reception. Games like Daikatana and Brutal Legend, whose hype failed to match financial expectations. It’s only going to get riskier in the future, as Triple-A games throw more and more money at projects and create an unsustainable environment for the industry that is bound to collapse at some point.

While there may be plenty of other colourful shooters gearing up to take on Blizzard’s darling, Lawbreakers has a different aesthetic approach. One where the action is portrayed through a more grounded lens. Or as grounded as a lethal cyborg assassin can be while sprinting over airwaves.

It wasn’t just the single-player action that made Gears of War a system seller on the Xbox 360. It was the multiplayer. A feature that almost never made it onto the final game.