CrossfireX

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

~ the obituary ~

The original CrossFire was built for a room I spent a lot of 2002 to 2005 in, except in another country. A Korean PC bang and a Chinese wangba run on a different economy from a Turkish internet cafe, and the game we all had open in Ankara was Counter-Strike, which is exactly the game CrossFire took its shape from when Smilegate released it in Korea in 2007. Tencent put it into China a year later and it became one of the largest games on earth by money. Smilegate's own numbers put it at six hundred and fifty million registered players with eight million of them online at once at the peak, and over ten billion dollars taken since 2007, second only to League of Legends. All of that happened in rooms I would have recognized on sight and never sat in.

CrossfireX was the attempt to take that to a console and to the West. Announced at Microsoft's X019 event in November 2019, free to play, Xbox One and Series X|S only, developed by Smilegate with the money and the platform push of an Xbox exclusive behind it. It shipped on 10 February 2022 after a delay, and the reception was among the worst a major backed release has had in recent memory.

It never got a second year. Smilegate posted the closure notice on 3 February 2023 and the servers went off at midnight UTC on 18 May.

~ the case file ~

~ what remedy was doing there ~

The strangest thing in the credits is Remedy Entertainment, the Finnish studio behind Max Payne and Alan Wake, who were contracted to write and build the two single player campaigns. Operation Catalyst followed Global Risk soldiers hunting a Black List officer in a fictional country called Azkharzia. Operation Spectre ran the same war from the other side, with a Black List contractor named Logan Brewer.

This was Remedy taking work-for-hire while building its own things, which is a normal thing for a mid-size studio to do and an odd fit regardless. The campaigns were not free. The multiplayer was free to play and the story content was sold separately, which is the detail that matters at the end.

~ the reviews ~

38 on Metacritic for the Xbox Series X version, sitting in the band the site labels generally unfavorable. IGN scored the single player 3 out of 10 and the multiplayer 2 out of 10, calling the gunplay and controls atrocious and the characters bland. Metacritic's own year-end tally put it as the second worst reviewed game of 2022.

A free-to-play shooter can survive bad reviews if the shooting feels right, because the people who stay are not reading reviews. The reviews here were bad about the shooting specifically, and the player numbers followed.

~ the campaigns went with it ~

When the shutdown was announced, Xbox pulled the game from sale immediately and offered refunds to anyone who had bought within the previous fourteen days. That covered people who had paid in the last two weeks and nobody else.

On 18 May 2023 the multiplayer servers closed and access to the paid single player campaigns closed with them, because the campaigns lived inside the same client. Remedy's work on Operation Catalyst and Operation Spectre is now unplayable by the people who paid for it, and there is nothing left to buy.

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