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Amazon has canceled Crucible, its free-to-download multiplayer action game.
Crucible launched in May 2020 with little fanfare, with the number of players declining soon after. In early June, Amazon “retired” two of its three modes. Then that same month, Amazon “released” the game, pushing Crucible into a closed beta in an attempt to salvage a years of development project.
In a post on the game’s website, developer Relentless Studios said that “we finally didn’t see a healthy and sustainable future ahead of Crucible.”
The development team will now transition to work on Amazon’s New World MMO, as well as other upcoming Amazon Games projects. A full refund is available for any purchase made, and in-game credit purchases are now disabled. The servers will remain active for custom games until November 9, 2020. Amazon has yet to say if the change will lead to layoffs.
Crucible has been a disaster for Amazon’s troubled entry into the video game market. When Crucible was announced in September 2016, it was heralded as a battle royale of sorts, an “ultimate third-person shooter” in which 12 hunters enter a hostile alien world, but only one emerges victorious. Not only that, it was said that because the world is dangerous, players would have to work together and make or break alliances on the fly.
Crucible was also supposed to have a player number 13, “a new type of player”, who could directly broadcast and impact the game by creating events. And, it was said, viewers on Twitch could also interact with the “gamemaster.”
But the first PC game developed in-house by Amazon changed dramatically over the course of development and was released as a free-to-download, team-based, MOBA-style third-person shooter. The features that were meant to lean on Amazon’s ownership of the Twitch streaming platform were no more. That player number 13, the “master of the game” who would broadcast Crucible and shock him, along with his viewers, was nowhere to be found.
Thoughts now turn to the aforementioned New World, which has no release date yet, although Bertie played it in August and was pleasantly surprised, and Amazon’s cloud gaming service Luna, due out for Fire TV, PC, Mac. , iPhone, iPad. and Android soon.
As with the similarly styled offerings from Google and Microsoft, Stadia and Cloud Gaming with Xbox Game Pass, Amazon’s proposition is immediate access to a wide range of games on multiple devices. However, unlike Stadia’s much-maligned effort, Amazon is opting for something closer to an all-inclusive subscription model, initially offering more than 100 games through its Luna + channel for a “launch price” of $ 5.99 per month during Early Access.
The games will be playable at up to 4K / 60fps and will initially include Control, Panzer Dragoon, A Plague Tale: Innocence, The Surge 2, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, GRID, Resident Evil 7, Abzu and Brothers: A Tale of two children. More will be added over time. Crucible, however, will not be one of them.
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