Amazon has made the unprecedented decision to withdraw its struggling free-to-play team-based shooter Crucible from general release, and it will now, a little over a month after its initial launch, re-enter a period of closed beta testing.
Despite being Amazon’s first foray into video games, Crucible released on Steam to remarkably little fanfare back in May, and while it managed to attract decent interest initially, concurrent player numbers have steadily fallen to peaks of less than two hundred players a day.
Amazon and developer Relentless’ initial, and rather surprising, response was to retire all but one of Crucible’s three modes, leaving only Heart of the Hives intact. “Focusing on one mode allows us to refine the design of core systems without the compromises we needed to make to support three game modes”, Relentless explained at the time.
Crucible | Launch Trailer Watch on YouTube
While jettisoning two thirds of the game a little over two weeks after its release certainly raised a few eyebrows, Relentless’ Colin Johanson insisted the studio had always planned to make significant changes to the core experience during Crucible’s “pre-season” period – which did rather raise the question of why Amazon hadn’t been more transparent and slapped an early access label on Crucible from the off.