The Cycle: Frontier No Longer ‘Financially Viable’ And Is Shutting Down In September
The Cycle: Frontier had a good run, until it didn’t. YAGER Developments has announced that it’s throwing in the towel after just three seasons and just over a year after it’s full release. The studio admitted that despite their best efforts the game just wasn’t doing as well as they’d hoped and is no longer “financially viable.”
YAGER went on to describe an incredibly successful launch that even required them to upscale their infrastructure to handle the influx of players. Unfortunately, the game’s initial success was marred by the team’s inability to address emerging gameplay issues and rampant cheating fast enough to rake in more players and make it profitable.
“The general behavior with online games after a good launch is a couple of nice weeks, then a dwindling interest, until stabilization after a few months,” YAGER explained. “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,” the team continued. “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.”
YAGER said that they’d hoped to kickstart the game with the launch of its second season but it didn’t generate enough attention to make that possible, forcing them to re-evaluate the current state of the PvPvE shooter to make sure that it was in line with their original 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,” they concluded.
As such, The Cycle: Frontier will be shutting its doors on September 27th. It will be a complete shutdown as the game is run server-side, which means there also won’t be private servers unless someone wants to invest in dedicated servers.
“We strongly considered making the game available to everyone, so that it can be enjoyed offline and possibly on private servers,” Yager explained. “Unfortunately, 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.”
In the meantime, the game has been pulled from the shelves and the Season 3 premium pass is now free for everyone to enjoy. Progression has also been sped up and the extraction shooter’s final patch has been deployed.
YAGER is also running multiple cash shop sales and promotions and will automatically be refunding all purchases made in over the last two weeks.
