Free-to-Play Shooter Spectre Divide Shutting Down Weeks After Console Launch

The free-to-play 3v3 shooter, Spectre Divide, is set to be discontinued just six months after its debut in September 2024, and shortly after its release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Mountaintop Studios, the game's developer, will also be shutting down operations.

Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell confirmed the news via a statement on social media, stating, "Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn’t achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat."

Spectre Divide Combat

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The team was initially optimistic, noting that the game drew in approximately 400,000 players in its first week, with a peak concurrent player count of around 10,000 across all platforms. However, Mitchell elaborated, "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."

Despite efforts to secure additional funding, a publisher, or an acquisition, Mitchell admitted, "We pursued every avenue to keep going... 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 players who spent money since the Season 1 launch will receive refunds.

This announcement contradicts earlier statements from October 2024, where Mitchell claimed, "The servers aren’t shutting down, and the updates aren’t going to stop," asserting that Mountaintop had "the funds to support Spectre for a long time."

IGN’s positive preview of Spectre Divide in August 2024 praised the game's tactical 3v3 format and its innovative Duality system, which allowed players to control two characters during matches. However, the swift closure of Spectre Divide echoes the struggles faced by other live-service games, such as Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Sony’s Concord.