"Spectre Divide: Free Shooter Closes Weeks Post-Console Launch"

The free-to-play 3v3 shooter Spectre Divide is set to shut down just six months after its initial launch in September 2024, and mere weeks following its debut on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Alongside the game's closure, its developer, Mountaintop Studios, will also be closing its doors. Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell confirmed the news via a statement on social media today.

“Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn’t achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat,” Mitchell explained in the post.

Spectre Divide Combat

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The team at Mountaintop was initially optimistic, noting that the game attracted around 400,000 players in its first week, with a peak concurrent player count of approximately 10,000 across all platforms. However, Mitchell's statement continued, “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.”

Mitchell elaborated on the efforts to keep the game and studio alive, saying, “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.”

Spectre Divide will be taken offline within the next 30 days, and any money spent by players since the Season 1 launch will be refunded.

This news contradicts earlier reports from October 2024, where Mitchell stated that Spectre Divide “isn’t going anywhere.” At the time, he assured that, “The servers aren’t shutting down, and the updates aren’t going to stop,” and maintained that Mountaintop had “the funds to support Spectre for a long time.”

IGN’s positive preview of Spectre Divide in August 2024 praised the tactical 3v3 shooter for its innovative Duality system, which allowed players to control two characters during matches. Despite this, the game's rapid shutdown joins a series of other live-service game failures, including Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Sony’s Concord.