The Cycle: Frontier

» see thecycle.game as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I missed this one on genre rather than on geography. My shooter years were counter-strike on internet cafe machines between 2002 and 2005, and by the time the extraction shooter existed as a category I was a working engineer with no interest in losing three hours and a backpack in the same evening. The Cycle: Frontier launched free on Steam on 8 June 2022 and I have never opened it.

Yager Development built it out of Berlin, and Yager is not a small studio. They made Spec Ops: The Line, the one military shooter of that decade people still argue about. The Cycle went into early access on the Epic Games Store in August 2019 as a battle royale with a shop you could summon in the middle of a match. Three years later it came back out as something else entirely: a looting game on a hostile planet where you fought the environment and each other, and anything you had not insured was gone for good when you died.

Reviews landed at 58 on Metacritic. PC Gamer gave it 55 and said a list of unlocks could not justify the time it was asking for. None of that is what killed it. What killed it is that the game got popular faster than the studio could hold it, and the people who stayed longest were the ones cheating.

~ the case file ~

~ the cheaters ~

The Steam peak was 40,854 concurrent players in June 2022 and the Twitch peak was 99,090 viewers around launch. Both are the high point of the entire life of the product, and both were set in the month it left early access. Everything after that is a line going down.

Yager's own account of the failure is unusually direct for a shutdown post. The infrastructure could not take the launch crowd, so the servers were bad. Once the servers were fixed the cheaters arrived, and in an extraction shooter one cheater ruins the session for everyone who was carrying anything. By the time the anti-cheat work landed, the players it would have protected were already gone. At the announcement the 24-hour Steam peak was around 2,400 and Twitch was averaging 456 viewers.

~ the actual end ~

The sunset notice went up in June 2023 and named 27 September as the last day. Yager said continued support was not financially viable, which is the standard sentence. The rest of the notice is the part worth keeping: the game could not be left playable offline or on private servers, because it ran on a dedicated backend that did not allow it. There was no build that worked without Yager's machines. When those switched off, nobody anywhere owned a copy of anything.

~ the long tail ~

Two volunteer revival projects have since put servers back up, one for the extraction shooter and one for the battle royale it used to be, both organized through Discord and neither connected to Yager. That is now the normal ending for a dead live-service game. The studio deletes the backend, and some fraction of the audience rebuilds it badly, for free, because there is no other way to see the thing again.

The lesson everyone drew from this was about anti-cheat budgets, and I think that is half of it. The other half is that a free game with no offline mode was never a thing you bought. It was a thing you were let into, for as long as the number of other people being let in stayed high enough to pay for the door.

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