Amazon Throws in the Towel for its First Major Game Crucible
Making games is hard but making one that’s both commercially successful and well acclaimed? Well that’s on another orbit of the hardness scale. This is probably why Amazon’s initial foray in gaming has been a failure. This is one of the industries where you can’t just throw money at a problem, if the core gameplay is dull, the playerbase is going to dwindle fast.
This is exactly what happened to Crucible, which was a very average title released in an extremely competitive PvP shooter scene where players have a plethora of other options. The game simply didn’t offer enough to compete.
After a very muted release the game was taken back to a closed beta, to work on features requested by the community and hopefully deliver a more fleshed out experience. Kudos to the devs here, all the new features were added in time (albeit custom games).
Although after a more recent evaluation of player feedback, the studio has decided to stop further work on the title. The team will transition to other projects under Amazon Games.
What’s Next For Amazon?
Failure is not alien to Amazon and they have had their fair share of it. The studio will continue working on other upcoming titles, most recent being “New World”.
Crucible’s failure is hardly going to deter the company from releasing more titles and between owning Twitch and having a big licencing deal with Crytek, the company seems well invested in gaming for the near future.
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.
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. We’ll be transitioning our team to focus on New World and other upcoming projects from Amazon Games.
We’re offering a full refund for any purchases made. You can find more information on our support page. We will also be disabling credit purchases within Crucible.
In the next few weeks we’ll be hosting a final playtest and community celebration, both in-game and in our official Discord. After that point we’ll be disabling matchmaking, although you’ll still be able to play Crucible through the custom games feature. Stay tuned for more information on that event. Servers will stay up for custom games until noon PST on Monday, November 9, 2020.
Thank you, as always, for being part of our community. This has been a labor of love, and we’re grateful for the time we got to spend on planet Crucible with you.
Signing off once more, -the Crucible team
