Here's why Amazon' Crucible was pulled from the stores and reverted to closed beta.

    Crucible , a free-to-play team-based action shooter, which took over 5 years and million of dollars to develop was pulled from the stores and reverted to closed beta after a rocky launch. Crucible dropped off from the charts just after the first week and was pulled from the stores after a month.

    In a blog post published Tuesday, franchise lead Colin Johanson says the focus is now on ”providing the best possible experience for our players as we continue to make the game better,” and so the game will be reverting back to a pre-release state to give the studio the space to make changes and plan a more robust launch.

    “We’ll continue following the roadmap we laid out previously and working on map, combat, and system changes to improve the Heart of the Hives experience as well as implementing other improvements based on your feedback and what we think the game needs in order to thrive,” Johanson writes.

    The move is a rather stunning admission of failure surrounding Crucible’s launch back in late May. But how did "Crucible," a free-to-play multiplayer game, go from a promising new game to being pulled from storefronts in just a few weeks?

    It's important to understand the type of game that "Crucible" is: a team-based online multiplayer shooter, more akin to "Overwatch" than to "Fortnite." But its gameplay takes more inspiration from the world of MOBAs – "League of Legends" and "DOTA 2," for instance – than competitive shooters like "Valorant" from Riot Games.

    While Crucible brought some genuine innovations to the table, the game’s lack of overall originality and its lackluster characters, combat, and art style made it largely forgettable. Moreover, Amazon didn't utilize its own streaming service, Twitch, to promote the game. There were no major streamers playing the game and hyping it up, no trailers for the game running as ads. Similarly on YouTube, where gaming dominates attention, ads for "Crucible" were nowhere to be seen. 

    The day after it launched, "Crucible" had around 25,000 concurrent players at peak. Just after one day, it had already disappeared from Steam's top 100. The poor launch of "Crucible" led to a gradual decline in players until, just a few weeks after launch, no more than a few hundred players were online at any given moment. These numbers are very bad for a free-to-play multiplayer game, where the business model is based on bringing in huge numbers of players. Because the logic for free-to-play games is you bring in a ton of players and then either sell ads that appear in-game based on those huge user numbers or sell in-game cosmetic items that players can purchase.

    Just over a month post-launch, Amazon pulled "Crucible" out of open release back into closed beta. For those that have Crucible already downloaded, Relentless says the game will still function as normal and can be launched from Steam without needing to download anything. Players will also retain battle pass progress and cosmetic items they may have earned or purchased, and the in-game store is staying open. Amazon said it will open up applications for entry in the coming weeks. 

    “We’ll keep putting out updates, working with organizers to run tournaments, talking with you on Discord, the subreddit, and our other social media channels, and making Crucible better and better with your help. When we exit beta, it will be based on your feedback and the metrics that we see in-game,” Johanson writes. Relentless is also encouraging players to continue sharing screenshot and clips, encouraging friends to play, and talking about the game openly on social media.