CrimeCraft

» see crimecraft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In August 2009 I was twenty five, a year or two into working, and my gaming budget did not stretch to an American shooter that wanted a box price and a subscription on top. That was not a hard decision from Ankara. It turned out not to be a hard decision anywhere, which is most of this story.

CrimeCraft came out of Vogster Entertainment, a Ukrainian studio with an American front office, and it called itself a Persistent World Next-generation Shooter, abbreviated in press materials to PWNS. The setting was a near-future collapse where gangs had taken over the functions of government. You lived in a persistent city that worked as a lobby, formed a gang, took quests off the NPCs standing around in it, bought weapons, and then dropped into instanced eight-versus-eight matches to actually shoot.

It shipped on 25 August 2009, online worldwide and at retail through an exclusive deal that put physical copies in Best Buy across the United States and Canada. THQ published that box. The shooting underneath was competent and the crafting system let you make your own weapons and clothing. Almost nobody talked about any of it for the first year, because of the price tag.

~ the case file ~

~ the price tag ~

You paid for the box, then you paid a monthly subscription. The game also carried sponsored advertising inside itself. Three revenue streams aimed at the same customer, in the year World of Warcraft charged for one and Team Fortress 2 was two months away from going free in everything but name.

The reaction was bad enough that Vogster reversed it in late October, roughly eight weeks after launch, in the first major patch. The subscription became optional and the box price went away, replaced by an Unlimited Free Trial that eventually settled into an ordinary free-to-play model with an optional sub and a gold bar currency at about five cents a bar. The studio had money trouble at the time and the reversal has always been read as a rescue rather than a change of heart.

What came after was better than the launch deserved. Bleedout arrived in autumn 2010 as a ten-week episodic campaign, one chapter a week, each drawn by a different comic illustrator, and Vogster took it to the publisher Archaia and printed the whole thing as a graphic novel. GangWars followed in Winter 2011 with a Quickplay mode and Territory Wars. There was even a Facebook and iPhone companion called Kingpin, built in the Mafia Wars shape, which was the obligatory move for any crime property in 2010.

~ refused classification ~

On 30 November 2009 the Australian Classification Board refused the game classification outright, which in Australia means it cannot legally be sold. The trigger was not the gang violence, it was the drugs: CrimeCraft let you craft and take performance-enhancing substances that gave real statistical benefits in a match, and the Board's standing line was that drugs presented as incentives or rewards are disqualifying.

The game's own crafting list put pharmaceuticals on the same bench as the rifles, which is a coherent design for a world where gangs have replaced the state and an unshippable one in one particular country.

~ the day it died ~

Vogster handed the game to Mayn Games in 2012 and it ran quietly for five more years. By mid-2015 SteamSpy was seeing under a hundred people a day launching it through Steam, and the Steam listing itself had gone up late, on 7 December 2011, well after the population question had already been settled.

The end came with a month's warning. Mayn posted on 1 August 2017 that CrimeCraft would close on the 31st at 10:00 CET, stopped currency sales the same day, and signed off "with sincerest regrets". On the morning itself they put up one more line: as we've previously announced, the sad moment has come, the CrimeCraft game server is closed. No reason was given for the closure in either post.

There is one piece of it that cannot be recovered. Playing CrimeCraft GangWars used to earn you a hat in Team Fortress 2, the Bolt Action Blitzer, and Valve never converted the promotion into anything obtainable another way. When the servers went off on 31 August 2017 the item stopped being gettable forever. A dead game is still holding a door shut inside a living one.

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