• News

Amazon's Crucible shuts down less than six months after launch

It's not quite 'Grand opening, grand closing' for Amazon's Crucible, but it's close.

Ozzie Mejia

October 9, 2020 6:30 PM

3

It hasn't been a great development cycle for Amazon's Crucible. It released back in May, was met with a tidal wave of "meh," and then reverted back to closed beta at the end of June. On Friday, Amazon decided to just wash their hands of this whole thing and never speak of it again. Amazon's shooter will close its servers next month, meaning it won't even reach its six month anniversary before shutting down.

Here's the announcement from the Crucible website (via GI.biz):

In July we moved Crucible into closed beta. We made a list of features we felt would enhance the player experience, which we shared publicly on our roadmap, and with the exception of custom games (which we expect to ship in the coming days), we completed them all. With those features shipped, our next step was to evaluate the feedback we've heard from you, paired with the data we've collected, to determine our path forward.

That evaluation led us to a difficult decision: we’ll be discontinuing development on Crucible. We very much appreciate the way that our fans have rallied around our efforts, and we've loved seeing your responses to the changes we’ve made over the last few months, but ultimately we didn’t see a healthy, sustainable future ahead of Crucible. We'll be transitioning our team to focus on New World and other upcoming projects from Amazon Games.

The post goes on to note that refunds for Crucible purchases will be honored. Matchmaking will be shuttered over the next few weeks while all custom servers will be shut down on November 9.

It's been a bad year for Amazon Game Studios' troubled project. Crucible had two of its three core game modes retired in early June, weeks prior to the game reverting to closed beta. The game released back in May to middling-to-bad reviews with PC Gamer citing its "boring combat and spotty performance." Player interest wasn't there either, as the game peaked at 25,000 concurrent players at launch.

Crucible isn't long for this world, so if you're interested in checking it out, you have the rest of October to jump in.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?