Amazon Admits Defeat in Maiden Venture Into Big Budget Gaming

Earlier this year, Amazon made its debut into big-budget gaming with its first major game named Crucible. The game, developed by Amazon Game Studios and published by Relentless Studios, is a free-to-play multiplayer third-person shooter. It was undoubtedly a special project for Amazon, as the company had previously focused only on mobile and tablet games. Evidently, things sometimes don’t work out even for the biggest corporation in the world.

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Amazon moved Crucible to closed beta in July

Just a month after its release, Amazon pulled back the game to a closed beta because of the lambasting feedback. Apparently, the game was trying to deliver a lot of things in a single package and failing at it. Back in July, developers were positive about improving the game. They had pledged to play the game themselves with the community for better feedback.

One could argue it wasn’t all Amazon’s fault. In the bigger picture, Valorant and Overwatch were already fan-favorites when Crucible released and the competition was too strict. But the developers did not help themselves by conjuring a complex and unsatisfactory title. Neither did they pull off a marketing masterclass, as Riot Games did with Valorant.

With all these developments, Amazon is now discontinuing the development of the game. The developers didn’t see a healthy and sustainable enough future ahead of Crucible.

Future plans for Crucible and the corporation’s game studios

Fortunately, for the fans, this is not the first and the last Amazon game. The corporation realizes that failure is an inevitable part of the gaming industry.

“We’ll be transitioning our team to focus on New World and other upcoming projects from Amazon Games.”

For Crucible, players will get a refund for all their purchases, and credit purchases will be disabled.

“In the next few weeks we’ll be hosting a final playtest and community celebration, both in-game and in our official Discord.”

Developers will disable matchmaking in the game, but players can still play through custom games feature. The servers will stay up for custom games till November 9, 2020, and it will be an official wrap after that.

The team has a very touching message for the fans in the end, “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.”

This incident is enough to prove that money is never enough to gain an audience in gaming. In recent times, AAA games are frequently getting negative reviews and indie games like Among Us are rising. The question now is, what will we see next from Amazon?

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