Five years ago next month, we learned about a new PvEvP “shooter with a twist” that was supposed to incorporate battle royale elements without just being yet another battle royale. It finally launched as The Cycle Frontier last summer, with seasonal play that ran three seasons. But unfortunately, that’s all it’s ever going to get, as developer YAGER announced this morning that the game is sunsetting in September.
“Despite our best efforts and meaningful improvements brought to the game since launch and up until the release of Season 3, the reality is that The Cycle: Frontier is unfortunately not financially viable,” the studio says. It goes on to describe a wildly successful launch that required an infrastructure upscale, but the company says it wasn’t able to tackle cheaters and gameplay issues fast enough to stabilize the playerbase and make the game profitable.
“The general behavior with online games after a good launch is a couple of nice weeks, then a dwindling interest, until stabilization after a few months. During perhaps one of the most important periods of a live game, we faced many challenges. One of them and perhaps the most crucial one was the increasing number of cheaters shortly after TC:F went live. Although we had tools and measurements in place, we quickly realized we needed to improve our anti-cheat efforts to be able to ensure a fair game experience for all players. By the time we got additional partners onboard for our anti-cheat efforts and could focus again on gameplay and performance improvements for The Cycle: Frontier, many of you had already been affected and as a result we saw a significant decrease in our player base. Season 2 didn’t generate enough attention to kickstart the game again, therefore we’ve critically reviewed if the current state of The Cycle: Frontier was in line with our initial vision. In a word, it wasn’t, so we needed to correct our course. That’s why we announced the end of global mandatory wipes, along with the introduction of free loadout runs, loadout presets and changes to the early game experience, all in an effort to make the game more approachable. Just to be clear, this seemed to convince many players, and we saw an increase in our success metrics with the release of Season 3. Unfortunately it was still not enough to make The Cycle: Frontier financially viable.”
The sunset date has been set for September 27th; in the meantime, sales of the game been shut down, there are sales and promos running in the cash shop, the season 3 premium pass is now a freebie, progression has been sped up, there’s a final patch, and refunds are owed to folks who bought anything in the last two weeks (no effort necessary on your part). Unfortunately, private servers aren’t on deck.
“Last point, we strongly considered making the game available to everyone, so that it can be enjoyed offline and possibly on private servers. Unfortunately, we had to come to the conclusion this wasn’t feasible. The Cycle: Frontier is a server-based game with a dedicated backend system, which doesn’t allow keeping the game somewhat available after being shut down.”
YAGER does note that it’ll still be around; it’s “taking all the valuable experience, learnings, and feedback [it’s] gathered and shifting [its] focus to new projects.” Our condolences to the team and the players.
