"Spectre Divide: Free Shooter Closes Weeks Post-Console Launch"

The free-to-play 3v3 shooter, Spectre Divide, is set to shut down just six months after its launch in September 2024, and only weeks after its release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Mountaintop Studios, the game's developer, is also closing its doors. In a statement shared on social media, Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell confirmed the challenging news.

"Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn’t achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat," Mitchell's post explained. The initial launch had shown promise, with around 400,000 players joining in the first week and a peak concurrent count of approximately 10,000 across all platforms. However, the post continued, "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."

Spectre Divide Combat

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Despite efforts to find a publisher, secure additional investment, or pursue an acquisition, Mountaintop Studios couldn't find a way forward. "We pursued every avenue to keep going," Mitchell stated, highlighting the challenging state of the industry. "In the end, we weren’t able to make it work."

Spectre Divide will be taken offline within the next 30 days, and any money spent by players since the Season 1 launch will be refunded. This announcement contradicts earlier statements from October 2024, where Mitchell had assured that "the servers aren’t shutting down, and the updates aren’t going to stop," and claimed that Mountaintop had "the funds to support Spectre for a long time."

IGN's positive preview of Spectre Divide in August 2024 praised the game for its innovative Duality system, allowing players to control two characters during matches. However, the abrupt shutdown follows a trend of other live-service game failures, including Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Sony’s Concord.