It’s sad to see good games go, especially ones in a limited genre, like extraction games. The Cycle Frontier was such a game, first released into Early Access in 2019, with a full, proper release a little over a year ago, on June 8, 2022. Fast-forward to today, and the developers, YAGER, have announced that servers will officially go offline on September 27, 2023.
Why is The Cycle Frontier Shutting Down?
YAGER, The Cycle Frontier’s developers cited several reasons for the game going offline. According to a blog post,
During perhaps one of the most important periods of a live game, we faced many challenges. One of them and perhaps the most crucial one was the increasing number of cheaters shortly after TC:F went live. 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. 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.
According to SteamDB, the game averages a little over 1.5K players at any given time, a significant decrease from their height of 40,000 concurrent players when the game originally launched. The devs go on to state,
Season 2 didn’t generate enough attention to kickstart the game again, therefore we’ve critically reviewed if the current state of The Cycle: Frontier was in line with our initial vision. In a word, it wasn’t, so we needed to correct our course. That’s why we announced the end of global mandatory wipes, along with the introduction of free loadout runs, loadout presets and changes to the early game experience, all in an effort to make the game more approachable. Just to be clear, this seemed to convince many players, and we saw an increase in our success metrics with the release of Season 3. Unfortunately it was still not enough to make The Cycle: Frontier financially viable.
Refunds will be offered to players who made a purchase after June 14, 2023, at 3 a.m. ET / 9 a.m. CEST.
To learn more, read the full The Cycle Frontier sunsetting blog post.
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