The Cycle: Frontier, a free-to-play extraction shooter from the developer of Spec Ops: The Line, is to shut down this autumn.
Just one year after it launched, free-to-play extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier is to shut down in September. Its makers, Yager Development, broke the news on Twitter, but went into greater detail about the closure in a blog post (thanks, Gamespot).
“This is a very hard decision for us,” the developer writes, “but after debating it for a long while, we had to accept this is the best course of action for Yager.”
Yager says that The Cycle is “unfortunately not financially viable,” and later describes the detrimental impact that cheating has had on its user base.
“Although we had tools and measurements in place, we quickly realized we needed to improve our anti-cheat efforts to be able to ensure a fair game experience for all players,” the post reads. “By the time we got additional partners onboard for our anti-cheat efforts and could focus again on gameplay and performance improvements for The Cycle: Frontier, many of you had already been affected and as a result we saw a significant decrease in our player base.”
The post goes on to say that, although interest began to pick up thanks to the developer’s attempts to “make the game more approachable” around the launch of The Cycle’s second season, the number of players “was still not enough” to generate the kind of profits that would have kept it going.
Prospectors,
Today’s news we share with a heavy heart.
The Cycle: Frontier will shut down on September 27, 2023.
Making this decision was very difficult for us, but ultimately was a necessary one.
More information about this, as well as refunds, our final patch, and more 👇 pic.twitter.com/w1Nji3Lxp4
— The Cycle: Frontier (@TheCycleGame) June 28, 2023
As a result, The Cycle: Frontier will shut down on 27 September, and certain changes are to be made to the game in the run-up to that date: faster progression, discounts on the in-game store, and so on.
The Cycle: Frontier first launched on 8 June 2022 to somewhat middling reviews, and while its support from Twitch streamers helped buoy it up for a while, the influx of cheats was evidently a major nail in its coffin.
There’s a final detail worth noting, too: Yager says that it had considered releasing a build of the game that fans could run on private servers. “Unfortunately,” the developer writes, “we had to come to the conclusion this wasn’t feasible. The Cycle: Frontier is a server-based game with a dedicated backend system, which doesn’t allow keeping the game somewhat available after being shut down.”
You can find full details of Yager’s pre-closure plans here.
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