Amazon’s Big-Budget ‘Crucible’ Is Putting Up Worse Numbers Than ‘Battleborn’ Did On Steam

Last week, Amazon debuted arguably its biggest video game effort to date, Crucible, a free-to-play PvP game that blends a few different genres together into something loosely resembling a “hero shooter,” given the classes and abilities, but in practice plays less like Overwatch and more like some Battleborn modes.

And it’s doing about as well as that game.

Despite having years of development time, tens of millions of dollars in investment (if not hundreds, though we don’t know the final number for sure), and the game actually being halfway decent, according to many critics, it has utterly failed to make an impact in the video game space as of yet, and short of some sort of random surge of interest, may follow the fate of other doomed hero-based games, no matter what kind of backing it’s had.

SteamCharts puts Crucible at an all-time peak of 10,600 players at launch, with interest steadily declining since then. The game literally came out a week ago and it has already dropped from that high to a peak of 4,400 players yesterday, and at the time of this writing it is the 188th most played game on Steam.

These numbers do not compare favorably to past, similar entries in this genre. Battleborn had a higher peak of 12,070 players, and had a similar crowd of niche hopefuls saying “actually it’s pretty good if you give it a chance.” LawBreakers, the famously disastrous Boss Key game, did peak lower at 7,480.

Regardless, the point is that this is not where a game like this wants to be just a week after launch. But quite simply there is pretty much zero buzz surrounding Crucible. It’s my job to cover games for a living and I have heard no one talking about it at all past launch day when I did hear that maybe it was good enough to check out (though Steam users would seem to disagree). Rather, Valorant, Fortnite, Warzone, Apex and all the usual suspects are dominating the PvP conversation.

Crucible has 855 people watching on Twitch right now, a week after release. Maybe this is one of those situations where throwing millions at top tier influencers to play your game could have actually helped, or at least gotten conversations started about it. The number one thing I hear when talking about Crucible is “What is that?” followed by “Wait, that came out?” if the person did know that it existed in the first place.

Given that Amazon is Amazon they potentially have the resources to turn this around…somehow, though how exactly they’ll go about doing that is a mystery to me. Interest in this game should not be this low this close to launch and some sort of immediate expansion or reset doesn’t seem like it would change that.

Amazon Game Studios is a very strange operation, having existed for years, recruiting top tier talent for…what, exactly? They’ve failed to produce much of anything, and even when they have and the product is decent, it fails to make a mark, like we’re seeing with Crucible now.

Just wait for their MMO New World. Now that will surely be the ticket. Yep. Just wait.