When the Crucible was delisted back to closed beta back in early July after its initial launch on May 20th, there seemed to be a chance of improvement as the devs collected and evaluated plenty of player feedback since. According to Relentless Studios, "One of the biggest changes you’ll see is that we’re going to schedule dedicated time each week when we as devs will be playing with the community and soliciting feedback." But a recent update for the game put a damper on things.

According to what is being called the final update by the development team: "...our next step was to evaluate the feedback we’ve heard from you, paired with the data we’ve collected, to determine our path forward. That evaluation led us to a difficult decision: we’ll be discontinuing development on Crucible."

The reason for such a drastic decision? The team "didn’t see a healthy, sustainable future ahead of Crucible" after all the data it gleaned from players during the closed beta period. So once the custom games feature is launched for current players, the devs will instead be putting their focus towards New World and other Amazon Games titles.

But the shutoff won't be as sudden as you think. Within the next few weeks, they'll host a final playtest and community celebration, both in-game and in the official Discord. After that point matchmaking will be disabled, although players can still play Crucible through the custom games feature until the shutdown date of November 9th at 12pm PT.

Crucible was developed by Relentless Studios, a Seattle-based development team of Amazon Games. The studio is led by Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Studios, and has plenty of industry veterans with previous experience at companies including Activision Blizzard, ArenaNet, Electronic Arts, and Xbox. Crucible was the first of two major titles from Amazon Games in 2020, followed by the launch of New World in August 2020.

Read up on our preview of the game here to see what it played like back when it first launched.