The rocky saga of Crucible, the free-to-play team-based shooter Amazon released in May 2020 and then unreleased in July 2020, is coming to an end. The developers announced today that they intend to shut down servers on November 9. The team will then transition to development on Amazon’s MMO, New World.
“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,” the announcement reads.
Crucible was the first major project from Amazon Game Studios. But when it launched, players were greeted by a buggy, unpopulated game that failed to garner much attention on Twitch. With Fortnite and Valorant amassing huge followings of both players and spectators at the same time, there just wasn’t any room for an uninspiring mashup of better games.
Over the summer, the Crucible team announced that they would be scaling back by removing game modes and returning the game to beta. Community playtesting sessions continued all the way up to this afternoon before the news dropped. The developers plan to hold one last playtest and some sort of celebration for the community “in the next few weeks,” after which matchmaking will be disabled ahead of the game’s complete shutdown.
“Thank you, as always, for being part of our community,” the official statement closes. “This has been a labor of love, and we’re grateful for the time we got to spend on planet Crucible with you.”