It's bad news for fans of Amazon's recently released, and subsequently unreleased, team shooter Crucible. Friday evening, the development team at Amazon Studios made the difficult announcement that Crucible's development is going to be discontinued. In the coming weeks, Amazon will be hosting a final playtest and "community celebration," after which Crucible's matchmaking will be disabled. Finally, the servers will be shut down on Monday, November 9 at noon PT.
The Crucible team'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," for Crucible. 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 seems Amazon Game Studios decided the changes were not enough.
Basically, Crucible launched on May 20 for PC. The game launched with virtually no advertising or fanfare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn't prove particularly successful. As such, the Crucible team at Relentless Studios moved Crucible back 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, the Crucible team said it would focus its development going forward on community feedback.
Specific features that Relentless had mentioned adding to Crucible included 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.
Despite Crucible's development coming to an end, the Crucible team plans one more addition before the servers go off: custom games. When matchmaking ends after Crucible'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 for Crucible's fans, it's one last opportunity for the Crucible dev team to deliver more of the experiences they enjoyed.
As for the future of the Crucible dev team at Relentless, developers will be shifted to other ongoing development projects at Amazon Games. New World is specifically mentioned, Amazon's MMO that's currently planned to release in 2021. The only other known game in development at Amazon is a Lord of the Rings MMO, though that wasn't mentioned by name. Nevertheless, it doesn't sound like any layoffs are happening.
Crucible is currently in closed beta on PC. Expect further details on its final playtest soon. Servers will close on November 9.
Source: Crucible