Amazon’s Crucible has ‘retired’ most of its modes following a slow launch

Amazon’s team shooter Crucible has retired two of its three game modes and delayed its first season indefinitely.

The move, shared on the game’s official website, follows a slow start for the free-to-play game, which at the time of publishing has less than 100 viewers on streaming platform Twitch – which its parent company owns.

According to Steam Spy, Crucible had a peak concurrent player count of less than 1,000 this weekend, which is less than expected for a free-to-play title backed by a major corporation.

Crucible is the Twitch owner’s first big stride into game software, as part of what is said to be an investment of “hundreds of millions of dollars” into game creation.

In its latest update, Crucible’s developer said the game would stay in pre-season until it was able to add player-requested features and polish to the game.

It also confirmed it would focus solely on the game’s MOBA-inspired Heart of the Hives mode going forwards.

“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,” it said. “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.”

Crucible’s updated direction will be rolled out in two phases, according to the dev blog. The first phase will build and iterate on core systems, including voice chat, an expanded ping system and a mini-map.

In the second phase, Amazon Games will add “additional systems and polish that will help elevate the Crucible experience.”

“A lot of the work in this second phase will depend on what we hear from you during phase one,” the developer said. “Right now our plans for improvements in the second phase include custom tailoring the map for Heart of the Hives, improving the creatures in the world, adding support for custom games, and enhanced social system functionality.”