It’s bad news for fans of Amazon’s recently released, and subsequently unreleased, team shooterCrucible.Friday evening, the development team at Amazon Studios made the difficult announcement thatCrucible’s development is going to be discontinued. In the coming weeks, Amazon will be hosting a final playtest and “community celebration,” after whichCrucible’s matchmaking will be disabled. Finally, the servers will be shut down on Monday, November 9 at noon PT.
TheCrucibleteam’s message is understandably solemn. In the post, the team starts by making clear it appreciates “the way that our fans have rallied around our efforts.” However, the team also says that it wasn’t able to see a “healthy, sustainable future,” forCrucible. No further specifics were provided for why the game is being shut down. A previous message from the developers detailed why the game was returning to a beta state in more specific terms. It seemsAmazon Game Studiosdecided the changes were not enough.
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Basically,Cruciblelaunched on May 20 for PC. The game launched with virtually no advertising or fanfare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t prove particularly successful. As such, theCrucibleteam atRelentless Studios movedCrucibleback into a closed beta state. At the time it reverted to beta, it was seeing concurrent player numbers between 100 and 200. At the time, theCrucibleteam said it would focus its development going forward on community feedback.
Specific features thatRelentless had mentioned adding toCrucibleincluded voice chat, a surrender option, AFK detection, a more robust ping system, and a mini-map. Less specifically, Relentless wanted to add another layer of polish to the game, as well as rebuilding the game’s map around its most-popular Heart of the Hives game mode. Notably, some of these planned changes were implemented since, including voice chat, surrender, AFK detection, a mini-map, and more.
DespiteCrucible’s development coming to an end, theCrucibleteam plans one more addition before theservers go off: custom games. When matchmaking ends afterCrucible’s final community celebration, custom matches will stay open until servers officially go down. It’ll be of little comfort given the foregone conclusion of the game being shut down. But forCrucible’s fans, it’s one last opportunity for theCrucibledev team to deliver more of the experiences they enjoyed.
As for the future of theCrucibledev teamat Relentless, developers will be shifted to other ongoing development projects at Amazon Games.New Worldis specifically mentioned, Amazon’s MMO that’s currently planned to release in 2021. The only other known game in development at Amazon is aLord of the RingsMMO, though that wasn’t mentioned by name. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sound like any layoffs are happening.
Crucibleis currently in closed beta on PC. Expect further details on its final playtest soon. Servers will close on November 9.
