The latest title by Amazo Game Studios came out in late May and it's not performing that well. Can Amazon prevent their title’s complete flop?
Admittedly, Crucible did not have it easy. 2020 is definitely the year of online multiplayer games. The competition? Huge. Call of Duty shines with their free Battle Royale Warzone, Apex successfully launches its new fifth season, Fortnite tries to keep its head above water with online events and Riot Games, in addition to their shooter Valorant, also Wild Rift and Legends of Runeterra. Sure, it's hard to grab attention like that, but Crucible doesn't cut a very good figure. After less than a month after release, the steam ratings are at 44% and according to Steamcharts the game already lost 45% of its active players. Well, at least there are no server issues due to an overload.
- READ MORE: Crucible - flop or hit?
The Crucible Anti-Flop Plan
Naturally, Amazon are not happy. They already had a game flop: Battleborn. The hero shooter failed to meet expectations in 2016 and Amazon will do their best to avoid that in 2020 with Crucible. But how? Colin Johanson, franchise leader of Crucible, has posted a video about this:
There's also a blog post on the official Crucible website:
The community has rallied around Heart of the Hives in an amazing way. 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. We'll be removing Alpha Hunters from the list of game modes soon, and Harvester Command once our new player experience has been improved.
The focus will initially be on the game modes "Heart of the Hives", which is particularly popular. The other two modes were already removed for the time being in order to be able to really concentrate on what fans like. In addition, the following features, which have been criticized by the users, are to come:
- A surrender option
- A voice chat
- BetterTutorial Videos
- An advanced ping system
- A minimap
- A way to replace/punish AFK players
Once these problems and features have been fixed or introduced, however, further improvements are still needed. Besides, a custom map for the one remaining mode, the creeps on the map will also be revised. An updated game menu would also be useful, as would a better respawn system. We also recommend Twitch Drops - that worked extremely well for Valorant. And every possibility to get attention should be used. The game's official release really lacked in the marketing department and we can see the results in the player numbers. The video also makes it clear that Crucible is currently in pre-season and Season 1 will not start until the developers and fans are happy.
It's nice to see that Amazon are the kind of studio that takes to heart player feedback. For now, it seems like they're on the right path to fix Crucible as nobody wants to see it completely flop.
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