Don’t let Radical Heights’ success surprise you

Radical Heights, a weaponized version of the game show Supermarket Sweep, has had a successful launch into the Early Access portal for unfinished games on Steam this week. That’s great news for Lawbreakers studio Boss Key Productions, which made this battle royale shooter, and it’s bad news for the guy on Steam who promised to buy everyone a game if it found an audience. But how is this knockoff getting any attention in a genre that already has dominant cultural juggernauts like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds? Simple: It found a niche by going free on Steam.

This is going to sound familiar: Radical Heights is a shooter where 100 players drop onto a map to fight each other until only one person is left standing. Like in PUBG, you can equip armor and helmets, and you can aim down sites. Like in Fortnite, you can find loot with color-coded rarity. It differentiates itself from those competitors with its 1980s game-show theme and a shopping system where you can buy weapons from vending machines using money that rolls over from match to match. But at its core, the gameplay doesn’t stray far from PUBG or Fortnite, and that’s one of the reasons that it works.