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Amazon Games / Aurich Lawson
It turns out that Amazon’s idea of a Melting pot he couldn’t stand the intense heat and pressure of the gaming industry.
After its launch in May of this year, Melting potAmazon Games, Amazon Games’ first large-scale shooter title for PC, will stop receiving updates and matchmaking support on November 9, the studio announced on Friday (at the exact time at the end of the week when bad gaming news they are usually sent to pastures). The company is taking the extreme measure of offering a “full refund” for any purchase made during the life of the free game, and is directing customers to make refund requests through Steam Support or the Amazon contact form. , depending on where they buy. they were originally made.
This followed the game’s formal removal from Steam in July, which followed painfully low concurrent player counts (as low as 200) that made it difficult for players to successfully match up with each other. Though the game launched with considerable attention, including a promotional blitz on Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch, it only briefly maintained a player population that surpassed 10,000 users.
Not the ping we were looking for
According to Amazon, the game’s removal in July was intended to allow developers to test and implement a “roadmap” of content and future fixes, and this included features that were sadly missing from its retail release. Like an “action-MOBA” game (think League of Legends or dota 2, mixed with the mechanics of the shooter), Melting pot failed to clarify key information to players in terms of where they could find teammates and objectives on the massive map, and was released without anything in the way of player communication options (ie, no text or voice chat, no visual “ping” system).
On top of those issues, the game launched with three significantly different game modes, stretching the character balancing issue all over the place. One of Amazon Games’ first big changes before the removal of Steam was to focus its matchmaking on a single game mode, but the damage was done.
In a post on Friday titled “Final Melting pot developer update, “the game’s developers put the blame on two factors:” the feedback we’ve heard from you, along with the data we’ve collected. “But the letter doesn’t explain what that data explains, which is probably scant data. , collected from the tiny player base left over after the Steam delisting. Melting potSteam was updated and the developers continued to release detailed patch notes, which we think could be paid for by an official “re-release” at a later date.
Strangely, Amazon Games has promised Follow patch and tweak the game in its 30-day completion period before closing development and “transition” your staff to the next MMORPG The new World (which received its own delay from this fall to 2021) and “other upcoming projects.” Once the game’s matchmaking service closes on November 9, your client will continue to support “custom” peer-to-peer matchmaking, which we seriously appreciate at Ars, rather than causing a game to die with their servers, and The staff will host a last hurray matchmaking frenzy with fans before the November 9 date.
Friday’s news follows this week’s Amazon Games report in Wired (full disclosure: Conde Nast is the parent company of Wired and Ars Technica), in which writer Cecilia D’Anastasio follows the ups and downs of nearly a decade of development. of games within the company, based on internal accounts. That included the story of Melting potThe considerable six-year development journey (allegedly hampered by Amazon management’s insistence on using its hacked Lumberyard rendering engine), along with claims that the game was almost released in 2018. Although the developers wanted to release it while it was released. “Battle royale” fever was at its peak, executives reportedly fearing to release anything less than “a billion dollar product.”
