Ghost Recon Phantoms

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

~ the eulogy ~

i missed this one. a free-to-play tom clancy shooter aimed at the counter-strike-adjacent crowd, launched into a market that already had counter-strike. i was thirty years old on an office desktop by 2014, not looking for another lobby to sit in.

ghost recon phantoms started life as ghost recon online, a browser-first free-to-play cover shooter ubisoft singapore built as a lighter cousin to the mainline ghost recon series. the beta ran from 2012 into early 2014. in march 2014 ubisoft renamed the game to phantoms and pushed a full launch on steam on 10 april 2014. the pitch was cover-based squad play at a lower barrier than the paid tom clancy games, with three classes covering the recon-support-assault split.

the game got seventy on metacritic and a seven and a half from ign. that was already a warning. free-to-play shooters with mixed reviews rarely survive the first winter.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

the cover-shooter-with-moba-classes idea was interesting on paper. in practice the queue times got long fast, and the game ran into the standard f2p problem where the highest-tier gear pool cost over a thousand dollars in real money to fully unlock. that priced out the casual crowd and slowly hollowed out the top end.

a wii u version was announced and then quietly dropped. the pc version limped through 2015 into 2016 with a shrinking playerbase.

~ the day it died ~

ubisoft announced the shutdown in september 2016, citing what they called "a slow but steady decline in users." the servers went dark on 1 december 2016. no offline mode, no way to keep playing the two and a half year old free game after the switch flipped.

the tom clancy brand continued without it. rainbow six siege was already the big f2p-adjacent tactical shooter for ubisoft by 2016 and did not need a second one competing for the same audience. phantoms was a bet that did not pay off.

~ what it left ~

almost nothing. the game does not run without the servers. the wiki page is short. the youtube gameplay uploads are mostly from beta 2013 and early 2014. of the tom clancy games in the ubisoft graveyard this one is the quietest, killed less by scandal than by attrition.

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