Amazon Game Studios’ ill-fated hero shooter Crucible is giving all of its unlockable items to players for free in the last few weeks before its servers shut down for good. Earlier this month, Amazon announced that the online-only game was going away in November.
Things didn’t look good for Crucible even before the big announcement that its days were numbered. After being available for just a month, Amazon Games took the unprecedented step of putting Crucible back into closed beta, essentially un-releasing the struggling game. In the short time that it was available, Crucible failed to find an audience, and those who did play the game had more criticism than praise for the shooter. Players who were already on board could continue to play Crucible during its closed beta redux, but developers were actively reworking the game at the same time. Clearly, though, even that wasn’t enough to save Crucible, as Amazon announced that it was pulling the plug after several months of the new beta.
Crucible held its final playtest on Friday, October 16, after which the matchmaking queue was disabled forever, according to Amazon. Players can still get their final matches in through November 9 by using newly added custom games. For both the last playtest and the next few weeks of custom games, Crucible players have access to every unlockable cosmetic option available in the game, including skins, emotes, and decals. As playing a custom game still requires a full eight-player group, Amazon previously recommended that fans organize in the game’s Discord server to put together private matches.
As Amazon Games’ first release, Crucible had a lot riding on its success. Plenty of players were skeptical from the start of Amazon’s attempts to buy its way into game development, especially as it quickly announced several simultaneous projects seemingly laser-focused on making the company even more obscenely rich. On top of Crucible, Amazon Games also has two MMOs - New World and an unnamed game based on Lord of the Rings - in the works, suggesting that its strategy was to target genres that can at least theoretically providing an unending revenue stream. Amazon also recently announced Luna, its cloud gaming service that will give the company even more share of the gaming space and integrate with its Twitch platform.
At a glance, Crucible didn’t look like a total disaster. It followed an already successful formula established by the likes of Overwatch and had at least some portion of Amazon’s practically unlimited wealth to lean on. In the end, though, despite the efforts of its developers to turn Crucible into something players actually wanted, Amazon Games chose to retire its first release almost as soon as it was out.
Crucible is available on PC until November 9.
Source: Amazon Game Studios
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