Amazon Games / Uric Lawson
As it turns out, Amazon’s idea of a crucible You just can’t handle the intense heat and stress of the gaming industry.
After launching in May this year, crucible, The first large-scale shooter title in Amazon PC games To stop receiving updates and matchmaking support on November 9th, The studio announced Friday (at exactly the same weekend hour the bad news stories about the game are sent to the pastures). The company takes utmost care to provide a “full refund” for any purchases made during the life of the free game, and directs customers to place refund requests through Steam support or Amazon contact form, Depending on where the purchases were originally made.
This came after the game Official deletion from Steam in July, Which followed painfully low simultaneous numbers of players (as low as 200) which made it difficult for players to successfully reconcile each other. Although the game launched with great interest, including a promotional campaign on the Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch, it briefly maintained a player count of over 10,000 users.
Not the ping command we were looking for
According to AmazonThe goal of deleting the game in July was to allow developers to test and implement a “roadmap” for content and future fixes, including features that were Sadly missing from its retail launch. As an “Action-MOBA” (think League of Legends or Dota 2Mixed with shooter mechanics), crucible Failed to explain basic information to players in terms of where they could find teammates and targets on the huge map, and it was launched without Any thing In the way of player communication options (meaning, no text or voice chat, no video “ping”).
On top of these issues, the game was launched with three massively different game modes, which added to the ubiquitous issue of character balancing. One of the first big changes to Amazon games before Steam’s removal was to focus the matching process on single-player mode, but the damage is already done.
In a post on Friday entitled “Final crucible Developer Update, “The game developers have blamed two factors:“ Comments we have heard from you, combined with the data we have collected. ”But the message does not explain what this data illustrates – which was likely scarce data, gathered from any small player base left after the write-off Steam… we’ve been watching that crucibleSteam updates for Steam saw developers continue to post detailed patch notes, which we thought might be prompted by an official “reboot” at a later time.
Weirdly, Amazon Games promised this continue Debugging and modifying the game at its 30-day expiration date before stopping development and “moving” its employees to Upcoming MMORPG game new world (Which received postponements from this fall to 2021) and “other upcoming projects.” Once the matchmaking service is discontinued on November 9, the customer will continue to support “custom” peer-to-peer matchmaking – which we seriously appreciate in Ars, rather than making the game die with its servers – and will host another bout of matchmaking frenzy Before the date of November 9.
Friday’s news follows this week’s news Wired’s Amazon Games Report (Full disclosure: Conde Nast is the parent company of both Wired and Ars Technica), as staff writer Cecilia D’Anastasio has been following the ups and downs of nearly a decade of in-house game development, based on internal accounts. And that included a story crucibleThe big six-year development journey (reportedly hindered Amazon management’s insistence on using the hack together Wood rendering engine), Along with claims that the game launched around 2018. Although developers wanted to release it during that time ‘Battle Royale’ fever It has peaked, and executives are said to be afraid to launch anything less than a “billion dollar product”.
