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

The free-to-play 3v3 shooter Spectre Divide, which launched in September 2024 and recently expanded to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, is set to be discontinued just six months after its debut. Alongside this, its developer, Mountaintop Studios, will also be shutting down. Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell confirmed the news in a statement published on social media today, citing insufficient success post-Season 1 launch as the reason behind the closure.

“Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn’t achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat,” Mitchell explained in the post.

Spectre Divide Combat

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Despite an optimistic start with around 400,000 players in the first week and a peak concurrent count of about 10,000 across all platforms, the game's active player base and revenue failed to meet the operational costs of both Spectre Divide and Mountaintop Studios. "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 post continued. "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."

Mountaintop Studios explored various avenues to sustain operations, including seeking a publisher, additional investment, and potential acquisition, but to no avail. "We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition. In the end, we weren’t able to make it work. The industry is in a tough spot right now," Mitchell stated.

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 closure contradicts earlier statements from October 2024, where Mitchell assured that Spectre Divide "isn’t going anywhere." He had claimed, "The servers aren’t shutting down, and the updates aren’t going to stop," and maintained 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's innovative Duality system, which allowed players to control two characters during matches. However, the abrupt shutdown of Spectre Divide joins the list of recent live-service game failures, including Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Sony’s Concord.