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Amazon has been an integral part of the gaming universe ever since it acquired Twitch in 2014. That’s also when Amazon Game Studios started working with Relentless Studios on a multiplayer shooter called Crucible. The game launched earlier this year, but Amazon stuffed it back into closed beta a few weeks later. Now, Amazon is admitting defeat and canceling the game in its entirety.
Crucible was just the latest in a long line of multiplayer first-person shooters such as Overwatch, Apex Legends, Destiny, and many more. Then you have the similar but distinct “battle royale” shooters like PUBG and Fortnite. This is a crowded space, to put it mildly, but Amazon forged ahead with Crucible anyway.
Unfortunately, early reviews of the game were mostly negative, citing boring combat, predictable enemies, and badly balanced PvP. Interest from gamers was also lacking. After several weeks, there were more people watching streams of the original Everquest on Twitch than there were watching Crucible matches. The number of people playing Crucible, which was free to download, numbered in the dozens.
Amazon and the developer seemed to take all this to heart, pulling the game from open access and returning it to closed beta status. It presented a list of changes it intended to make in the game like adding voice chat, cleaning up the combat, and coming up with a way to deal with players going AFK.
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That was in July, and news has been scarce ever since. According to the latest Crucible dev update, the team has concluded there’s no “healthy, sustainable future ahead of Crucible.” The developers didn’t elaborate on the reasons for the shutdown, but things must be rough if they’re willing to lose six years of development on a game that will never launch. The raft of similar games with established player bases probably also helped convince Amazon Crucible had little chance of success.
While the game will never launch, dedicated players will have a chance to experience the mediocre shooter for a little longer. In the coming weeks, the developers will host one final playtest with the community. After that event, the Crucible team will disable matchmaking for online play. You will still be able to create custom games until the servers go offline, which happens at noon PST on November 9th. Anyone who spent money on in-game items will get a refund — Amazon even has a support page to help with that.
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