Spectre Divide Is The Latest Live-Service Casualty, Game And Dev Shutting Down

Spectre Divide developer Mountaintop Studios has announced that the free-to-play game will be shutting down just six months after it first launched. While the 3v3 first-person shooter received fairly positive feedback after its initial release, Mountaintop Studios says that a steady decline in players and a lack of funds contributed to its demise.

Studio CEO Nate Mitchell explained that the studio explored every possible avenue it could to keep the developer and the game afloat, but after exhausting all of its options, the writing was sadly on the wall for Spectre Divide and its team. “The industry is in a tough spot right now,” Mitchell said.

“We were optimistic about the first week. We’ve had 400,000 players play, with a peak concurrent player count of 10,000 across all platforms,” Mitchell explained in a Steam Blog post. “But as time has gone on, we haven’t seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs of Spectre and the studio. Since the PC launch, we stretched our remaining capital as far as we could, but at this point, we’re out of funding to support the game. This means Mountaintop will be closing its doors at the end of this week.”

Live-service games appear to be in a tough spot right now. While giants in the genre like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone still have healthy player numbers, the last few years have seen several live-service projects arrive and face an uphill battle in retaining their initial momentum.

Sony’s Concord was a high-profile flop for the company, leading to several other live-service projects that were canceled. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was another live-service game that failed to find an audience, joining a growing list of titles like Redfall, Anthem, and Marvel’s Avengers after it was effectively canceled when Rocksteady announced that ongoing support for it was coming to a close.