“We were optimistic about the first week,” developer Mountaintop Studios says in a post. “We’ve had ~400,000 players play, with a peak concurrent player count of ~10,000 across all platforms. 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.”
The studio expects to take Spectre Divide offline “within the next 30 days,” and it will refund all money since the game’s first season, which kicked off on February 25th. Mountaintop Studios will also be “closing its doors” at the end of the week, according to the post.
“We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition,” Mountaintop says. “In the end, we weren’t able to make it work. The industry is in a tough spot right now.”
In December, Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell and Spectre Divide game director Lee Horn told The Verge that things were already dire, and that the game’s console launch and new season would be its hail mary play. Horn said that the marketing was working going into launch, but that server issues at launch axed its momentum. “Unfortunately, the game fell over on day one,” he admitted.
Mitchell told us the game needed thousands of concurrent players if it was going to survive, or else the company would run out of money this year. Unfortunately, the game’s new season peaked at just over 1,000 concurrents on Steam, and has been downhill ever since; presumably, Mountaintop saw its multiplatform peak of around 10,000 players drop similarly.
“If the players are enjoying the game… if they aren’t into season one, they way we hope they are, we’ll have to take a hard look at if we should keep going on as we are, or if players are telling us this isn’t what we want,” Mitchell told us in December. Apparently, Mountaintop did have to take that hard look, and this is its decision.
Additional reporting by Sean Hollister