Amazon Game Studios 'Crucible' retires two game modes just weeks after release

Amazon Game Studios’ hero shooter, Crucible, launched on May 20, 2020, on Steam, but the sci-fi third-person game has not been met with much success or praise.

The game received only a 54% overall score on Metacritic, with an even lower rating of 48% on PC Gamer. The reviews from other sites were also mixed.

Crucible has shaky start

Developers Relentless Studios had to make a statement regarding the game modes they would be pulling, to focus on the more popular ‘Heart of Hives’.

The dev blog states: "Moving forward, we’ll be putting all of our efforts towards Heart of the Hives and what we can do to make that mode shine. Focusing on one mode allows us to refine the design of core systems without the compromises we needed to make to support three game modes. This does mean that we’ll be retiring Harvester Command and Alpha Hunters for the foreseeable future."

The numbers following release were not what the optimistic devs had in mind for Amazon Game Studio’s biggest project to date, with SteamCharts putting Crucible at an all-time high of just over 10,000 players at launch. Since then, the game has dropped to an average of 2,222 monthly players in June at the time of writing. 

For a game with a budget of an estimated $300M and years of development from a team of hundreds, these numbers are devastating.

Why did it fail?

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So, what could be to blame? Well, the current Coronavirus pandemic meant the studio couldn't release Crucible in the fashion it would have liked, forcing the game to have a remote launch without any in-person events.

The game is still in “pre-season” while the devs fine-tune and tweak the game, also giving them more breathing room to chop and change as they wish, with no backlash from fans for messing with a “fully finished game”.

Even given having a “pre-season” status to fall back on, Crucible was still receiving backlash for not launching with core features such as voice comms, AFK player combative features, and good enough ping system, or even a mini-map.

A developer update on June 4 addressed these concerns, thanking fans for their honest feedback and promising changes to the game.

This isn’t to say the Crucible community aren’t enjoying the game, as its delightful sci-fi elements and combo of different competitive gameplay elements are reminiscent of Destiny, Overwatch and even Fortnite.

Crucible is available now for PC, only on Steam.