Amazon’s free-to-play, third-person Hero shooter, Crucible, has walked one hell of a rocky road. Originally planned for a March release, the coronavirus pandemic delayed its debut until May. After middling feedback from players started rolling in, the team unexpectedly returned the game to Closed Beta status on July 1st to adapt. Despite axing some gameplay modes entirely, steady updates continued into September but on October 9th the team declared there was no “healthy, sustainable future” for the game and have announced plans to close down operations.
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.
– PlayCrucible.com Post
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.
We’re offering a full refund for any purchases made. You can find more information on our support page. We will also be disabling credit purchases within Crucible.
In the next few weeks we’ll be hosting a final playtest and community celebration, both in-game and in our official Discord. After that point we’ll be disabling matchmaking, although you’ll still be able to play Crucible through the custom games feature. Stay tuned for more information on that event. Servers will stay up for custom games until noon PST on Monday, November 9, 2020.
Thank you, as always, for being part of our community. This has been a labor of love, and we’re grateful for the time we got to spend on planet Crucible with you.
Signing off once more, -the Crucible team
Along with disabling in-game purchases, the team has already removed Crucible from availability on Steam. I’ll add the November deadline to the Watch List calendar and have a page up on the site soon. Thanks to @Roc6d for pointing out the news.