After Six Years of Development, Amazon Kills Its Game 'Crucible' Within Five Months (theverge.com) 45
"It's the end of a rocky journey..." writes the Verge. After six years of developing the free first-person shooter game Crucible, Amazon launched the game in May, yanked it into closed beta in July, and then 14 weeks later cancelled the game altogether. Ars Technica reports:
This followed the game's formal delisting from Steam in July, which followed painfully low concurrent player counts (as low as 200) that made it difficult for players to successfully matchmake with each other. Though the game launched with considerable attention, including a promotional blitz on the Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, it only briefly maintained a player population exceeding 10,000 users.
"...ultimately we didn't see a healthy, sustainable future ahead [for] Crucible," explains a blog post from Amazon's Crucible team. The Verge reports: The developers will be hosting a "a final playtest and community celebration" in the next few weeks, according to the blog. Once that's done, matchmaking will be disabled, but you'll be able to play custom games (which are expected to be available in the coming days) until 3PM ET on November 9th. The company also says that it will be offering a full refund for any purchases you might have made...
Crucible developers will be moved to other Amazon Games titles, including New World, Amazon's upcoming massively multiplayer online game. That game, which is currently set to launch in spring 2021, has had its own set of challenges, including two delays. And we're also still waiting on the release of Pac-Man Live Studio, a version of Pac-Man that you can play directly on Twitch. Amazon said in May that the game would launch in June, but it's still not out, and the game's website only says that it's "coming soon."
"...ultimately we didn't see a healthy, sustainable future ahead [for] Crucible," explains a blog post from Amazon's Crucible team. The Verge reports: The developers will be hosting a "a final playtest and community celebration" in the next few weeks, according to the blog. Once that's done, matchmaking will be disabled, but you'll be able to play custom games (which are expected to be available in the coming days) until 3PM ET on November 9th. The company also says that it will be offering a full refund for any purchases you might have made...
Crucible developers will be moved to other Amazon Games titles, including New World, Amazon's upcoming massively multiplayer online game. That game, which is currently set to launch in spring 2021, has had its own set of challenges, including two delays. And we're also still waiting on the release of Pac-Man Live Studio, a version of Pac-Man that you can play directly on Twitch. Amazon said in May that the game would launch in June, but it's still not out, and the game's website only says that it's "coming soon."
Re: Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one here who thinks hyping unfinished games or products should be a criminal offense?
Tell us when you are done! Otherwise shut the fuck up!
OK, all dishonesty in business should. Especially lying by omission and by technicality. So all of advertisement as we know it.
Re: Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Software projects are never finished, only abandoned.
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This is also the first I'm hearing of it too. I'm going to call this Googlecution, where you only hear about a product when they decide to kill it.
Hats off to the devs (Score:4, Interesting)
To all the devs, I just want you to know we all feel for the blood and sweat you put into something that will never see its full potential... always a sad thing to see.
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"hats off to the devs"
I had meant to click on the story next to this one, about the top flying off a Tesla the day it was purchased. Your comment made perfect sense for that story too.
Re: Hats off to the devs (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they could still release it as open source, under a creative commons license.
In fact, it should be just like with patents, where when you do not sell the product within $n years, your privileges vanish and it can be freely used.
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That's exactly why the original copyright periods were for about 10-12 years. So people could get stuff out, and pay their bills for a while as they worked on the next thing to pay the bills. After that, people got to use the good bit they'd built as a foundation for their own interpretations and so on.
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No Ronnie O'Sullivan or Steve Davis (Score:1)
I'm not sure it was even based on snooker. Better luck next time, Amazon.
Poor PR (Score:5, Insightful)
> Though the game launched with considerable attention...
No, I'm on Amazon daily. I'm an Amazon Prime member. I watch movies on the Roku Amazon Prime channel a couple of times a week. I read Google News, Techdirt, Slashdot, Cnet, Wired(sucks now), and others.
I'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. EVER. Neither have my friends that I just asked.
E
Re: (Score:3)
I only heard of it back in July, when the problems and low user counts dragged it back into a closed beta test. Amazon did a lackluster job of promoting the game, but the trajectory of the game suggests that it was just not solid enough to be viable, so more promotion might have backfired on them.
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Amazon's business plan (Score:2)
... is throwing money at enough potentially profitable stuff, never making a profit and never paying taxes.
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Re: Poor PR (Score:2)
Second largest vendor? Their vending business is not what makes them a profit. Their "cloud" business is. The rest is apparently still it "grow until you have murdered literally everything else in that industry, whatever it takes" mode.
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Everyone can guess why though knowing amazon, probably pay to win on ultra steroids. MAXIMUM GRIND, the designed to ensure those who spent the most won the most. Everything was extra, I could imagine them doing a FPS where those who did not buy it got no weapon and bullets cost extra, the better the more they cost. Don't pay and you will have to shop someone who plays ten times but they can one shot you. All kinds of shit like that, in the greedy little minds, it was a money machine and all the focus went i
Re:Poor PR (Score:5, Interesting)
It was all over Twitch and our work #gaming slack had a few choice mentions. If you are a gamer, you knew about it. Otherwise, it was a "wait and see" from AMZ before they were going to spend on hype.
Modern game design is not that big a mystery.
Balancing around hard counters (even if they are slight) in a team game without power spikes is a doomed proposition (Crucible, Heroes of the Storm).
You have to allow dedicated players (singular or as a team) to excel, without resorting to multi-dimensional calculations (PoE^) to appeal to a larger audience (Fortnite, LoL, Diablo 3).
A grind to top level play doesn't seem to hurt adoption (inexplicably to me), but not too big (League of Legends, Gwent, Diablo 3) as long as those power spikes exist (preferably with risk-reward like drop-on-death items) and there is meaningful impacts to the slightest variations. This makes patches exciting (LoL, Gwent, PoE, HoN, Starcraft 2).
Multiple game modes keeps the game fresh where there can be wild imbalances in the game for a time (LoL, Gwent, HoN). HoN not being free, adding toxic taunts/announcer packs and adding a hero every couple weeks made the pool too big and complicated too quickly, which held on for a little bit with some of the seasonal game modes (like Devourer hook wars) and literal gambling, but you ended up with a dead game anyway.
There were a lot of lessons learned in the lifecycles of HoN / LoL / Dota2 / Demigod / etc. Smite is still around, but for how long? Crucible bucked everything that we can observe with predictable results.
Launch day and Amazon's own game didn't even break top 10 on their own platform so they pulled it and it never came back because it wasn't going to be popular due to design failure.
^ Path of Exile is existing with a player base of 125k players or so - see steamcharts.com vs Diablo 3 with millions on PS3/PS4
Re: Poor PR (Score:3)
âoeIf you are a gamer, you knew about it.â
Well I guess it depends on what all you mean by gamer but I play games and I had never heard of this before.
Re: Poor PR (Score:4, Insightful)
Not all gamers watch Twitch. Some people actually like to play games instead of watching other people play games.
Personally I find the concept of watching someone play a game to be as interesting as watching someone else watching a movie, as in boring as hell.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
You have to allow dedicated players (singular or as a team) to excel
That necessitates a decent lobby or league system, so the rounds are somewhat balanced. Some games are horrible at that, and you invariably end up with a few pro players cleaning up the map round after round. That gets old real fast.
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Your post sounds interesting, but as a less-dedicated gamer I honestly can't make sense of some of your terms. What are "hard counters"? I sort of know what you mean by "power spikes", but...would you consider expanding your post into plain English?
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I read Google News, Techdirt, Slashdot, Cnet, Wired(sucks now), and others.
There was an article here [slashdot.org] and was mentioned here as well. [slashdot.org]
Not many comments though. Somebody should have blamed Trump or something to get the counts up.
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I'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. EVER.
We talked about it on Slashdot....
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You seem to have an off-by-2 error there.
A Wired article goes into Amazon's gaming (Score:3)
https://www.wired.com/story/am... [wired.com]
Amazonâ(TM)s other marquee title, Crucible, was having growing pains of its own. After four years of work, with designers and engineers fighting Lumberyard all the way, it wasnâ(TM)t billion-dollar-franchise material. Still, by 2018, many employees considered the game ready for releaseâ"or, at least, ready to be pushed out of the nest. The diverse characters and alien landscapes were gorgeously designed. The combat felt exhilarating, as the flow of the game oscillated between one-on-one battles over resources and epic team brawls. It wasnâ(TM)t perfect, but it was playable. And the timing was good for a launch: Other popular battle royale games, including Fortnite and PlayerUnknownâ(TM)s Battlegrounds, were pulling in millions of players internationally.
âoeIf you were any other game studio, you would have cut your losses and released the game,â one former employee said. But Amazon Game Studios didnâ(TM)t do that. âoeBecause it was going to be one of the first front-facing elements of AGS,â the source added, âoeit had to be ready to be a billion-dollar product. So they had to keep working on it until it got to that stage.â ...
Crucible wasnâ(TM)t released until the spring of 2020, by which point much of the hype around the battle royale genre had died down. Many critics panned it as a heartless amalgamation of popular gaming tropes. (I quite liked it.) Crucible didnâ(TM)t have Twitch integrations, as promised, or even a voice comms system. Ten thousand people downloaded it on Steam, the online game distribution service, and it once received an impressive 120,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch. But enthusiasm waned. A little over a month after the gameâ(TM)s release, in a decision that shocked the industry, Amazon unreleased Crucible. (On October 9, two days after this story was originally published, the company announced that it was permanently halting development of the game and âoetransitioning our team to focus on New World and other upcoming projects.â)
Could it ever have been saved (Score:1)
So they had to keep working on it until it got to that stage.
It makes you kind of wonder, are there just some ideas that are not possibly to work enough on to become great?
I saw some video of the game, and also thought it seemed kind of generic... it just didn't have enough differentiation in ant particular aspect to make it worth playing vs. every other game.
It really does seem like back about two years ago, they should have maybe had the team start from scratch, maybe shaking up the design team somehow.
Soulless business realizes games need soul. (Score:2)
And evem the very little remaining at established big game studios is too much for the alien lizards.
News at 11. ;)
Never heard of it (Score:2)
"Launched with considerable attention" ORLY? I've never heard of it and I'll bet a lot of people haven't either. Might be the problem right there.
just another fortnite clone? (Score:1)
Pretty sure I saw some ads for this around the time I stopped playing fortnite.
Can't say I'm surprised (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm intrigued by this demand for story.
If I'm playing an online shooty people game then I want responsiveness, game mechanics, graphics all to be at or above a certain level, I want people to play with and against and.. well, that's sorted.
Story? Why?
I do story in single-player games, where I can pause, take my time, explore, enjoy a well paced tale told with skill and inventiveness.
Online? Ask me again after I've had another few matches in Rocket League.
Struggling as the AMAZON game studio (Score:1)
Even just being a game studio, they have to overcome the stasis that is Amazon. It's not just to please a singular person, but a range of mid- or senior-level managers outside the studio...any of which can send you back to the drawing board, at any stage.
Amazon, you have my sympathies. It's great that you want to release an amazing title, and that you continue to try. At this point, it feels like a trap...you're stuck aiming for bigger every time, to make up for each previous struggle. Good luck!
new world will be the same (Score:2)
It's already a shit show. ....which, it turned out, was really only meant to incentivize you to get into the PvP they wanted you to play.
They spent years developing a PvP game where you could loot other players you killed and then were astonished that early beta turned into a gankbox where high level players didn't bother fighting each other, but farmed low level players murdering them impunity for their gear.
This was utterly predictable.
Then they hastily bolted on some pve gameplay
Now we're at iteration 3?
Amazon entertainment sucks beyond belief (Score:1)
99% of Amazon original movies and TV shows are not just bad but THE WORST IMAGINABLE SCHLOCK. Like Disney Star Wars bad!
It's as if they found writers who are even worse than the current nadir of Hollywood standards and gave them carte blanche.
This is a classic case of a company with too much money being suckered into ventures they have no business being in.
Remember that all of Howard Hughes' movies and airplane ventures failed and failed hard. His money came from the Tool manufacturing company left to him
it's really sad (Score:1)