Amazon’s Crucible will be shut down before the end of the year, just five months from the launch of the game. Crucible has only really been around since mid-July and it’s already failed. This certainly spells doom for Amazon’s hopes of pushing their games division into a force in the industry.
Announcing the news via a statement on the game’s website over the weekend, developer Relentless Studios said “In July we moved Crucible into closed beta. We made a list of features we felt would enhance the player experience, which we shared publicly on our roadmap, and with the exception of custom games (which we expect to ship in the coming days), we completed them all. With those features shipped, our next step was to evaluate the feedback we’ve heard from you, paired with the data we’ve collected, to determine our path forward.”
The original plan had been to push new features since the game launched in May 2020 as part of an ongoing roadmap. That plan has obviously fallen through as the company can’t maintain the cost of their games division with so few people playing. The first signs of trouble hit in July, right when the first post-launch season began, as fewer than 100 concurrent players were online in-game.
The game was doing so bad that it was actually unreleased. The plan then was to slowly roll the game back out and have the developers take community feedback as they went, all with a plan to overhaul the game and introduce new modes. Although the efforts to revamp the game clearly haven’t panned out for Amazon’s Crucible.
“For the most part, your experience as a Crucible player will stay pretty much the same while we’re in beta,” wrote franchise lead Colin Johanson. “One of the biggest changes you’ll see is that we’re going to schedule dedicated time each week when we as devs will be playing with the community and soliciting feedback. The game will be accessible 24/7 so you can continue to self-organize matches with other players—we recommend joining our Discord server to find players to queue against.”
Going further the team announced that though the game is closing down, they’re still thankful for all of the fan support that has been given.
“That evaluation led us to a difficult decision: we’ll be discontinuing development on Crucible. We very much appreciate the way that our fans have rallied around our efforts, and we’ve loved seeing your responses to the changes we’ve made over the last few months, but ultimately we didn’t see a healthy, sustainable future ahead of Crucible.”
The game will end with a “final playtest and community celebration” as the servers are shut down on November 9.
