The Cycle: Frontier, an extraction shooter from developers Yager, will be shutting down in September.
The game launched on 8 June 2022 and put players into the sci-fi booties of a prospector on the planet Fortuna III, with players falling from space to hoover up loot complete quests and then hightail it to an extraction zone with a similar vibe to games like Escape From Tarkov or Marauders.
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/w1Nji3Lxp4June 28, 2023
There was a fair amount of buzz around the game at launch, although that dissipated after a couple of weeks. Visiting the game’s Wikipedia page now and there are several malicious edits that have been reverted accusing the players of spending development budget on big name streamers instead of on making the game better. While this primarily shows a blatant lack of education on how marketing and development budgets are allocated, it shows that the game’s audience definitely has grievances.
Looking at the game’s active players, there’s been an average of just under 2,000 players on The Cycle: Frontier at any given time over the last 7 days, with that a peak of just 40,690 players when the game was at its biggest in June 2022.
I played the game ahead of launch and found it to have a fairly good world with some subpar gunplay that was fine, but didn’t have the quality you need to maintain popularity in a world where, let’s be honest, you can play Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone or Valorant for no money.
The game currently has a 58 per cent on review aggregation site Metacritic.
In a 2 star review on NME, writer Nic Reuben claimed: “There’s a great game somewhere inside The Cycle, and lush world design, clever environmental layout, and solid gun feel all point towards it. Unfortunately, it’s all rendered into tedious, cynical nonsense by a mobile-game style approach to progression and monetisation, and a thin, repetitive core loop.”
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