Mountaintop Studios Announces Imminent Closure, Spectre Divide Will Go Offline Soon

[T0@st]

Dear Spectre Fans, it's been two weeks since we launched Spectre Divide Season 1: Flashpoint. We're incredibly grateful for the positivity and support that you've shown over that short time. Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn't achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat. We were optimistic about the first week. 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. 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. This means Mountaintop will be closing its doors at the end of this week.

We expect to take Spectre offline within the next 30 days, but we plan on disabling new purchases and refunding money spent since Season 1 launch via the platforms. We'll be following up with more information on this soon. 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. This is a painful update to share. We love Spectre, and we're incredibly proud of what we built with this community. From the entire team at Mountaintop, I want to thank the Spectre community for all your support these past few years. We've loved every minute, and we're sincerely going to miss you. Special thanks to our incredible investors too, without which Spectre wouldn't have been possible.




This has always been a passion project for us, born out of love for this genre. An indie team of insanely talented individuals who came together from around the world to build a game we believed in.

We wanted to deliver something innovative and original in a crowded genre that would bring friends together around unforgettable moments. We shook up the format, created a fresh art style and universe, and partnered with some of our heroes. All of us knew from the beginning that the odds were against us, but that's what we signed up for. It was never a surefire bet. We did it anyway.

We had a few tough stumbles out of the gate when we launched in Sept. But this team rallied and poured everything into tackling your critical feedback for Season 1. We made major changes and improvements to virtually every area of the game and brought the game to consoles. Even though it wasn't enough to achieve financial success, this team fought tooth and nail and went down swinging.

Game development is full of twists, turns, and surprises, and the industry has changed dramatically since we started the project in 2020. Even though we missed the mark this time, we wouldn't trade the journey for anything.

That's all from us. See you out there.
Nate & the Mountaintop Team

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Cheeseball]

This is the CS2/Valorant-like that shroud marketed as his own game and as the article says it has failed hard.

I tried it out, great concept with controlling two different characters but the gimmick did not last long as interest dropped since the Deadlock CBT launched nearly the same time and shroud himself was playing it more often on stream than "his own" game.

 

[scottslayer]

Garbage in, garbage out

 

[Assimilator]

I wonder how long it's going to take for developers and publishers to understand that releasing derivative trash into genres filled with it, is not a viable strategy?

 

[Onasi]

@Assimilator
I think you and me are both old enough to remember the mid-90s Doom clones, late-90s-early 00s RTS boom which killed the market with over-saturation, then the endless WoW killers, CoD killers, MOBAs that failed hard… So, safe to say it doesn’t look like that’s ever gonna happen. It’s just going to be

 

[Assimilator]

@Assimilator
I think you and me are both old enough to remember the mid-90s Doom clones, late-90s-early 00s RTS boom which killed the market with over-saturation, then the endless WoW killers, CoD killers, MOBAs that failed hard… So, safe to say it doesn’t look like that’s ever gonna happen. It’s just going to be
View attachment 389663

Yeah, 'twas a rhetorical question; Dunning-Kruger, ego and greed will always win out over rational market segment analysis. The current strategy to justify ignoring the latter seems to be (a) recruiting streamers to pimp your game (b) listing "industry veterans" as if that actually matters to whether players actually enjoy the game. As this news shows, that "strategy" is working out just great.