by 
I’m not sure where we go from here with live service games, especially ones released within the crowded competitive shooter space.
Quantic Dream has announced it's cancelling development of its free-to-play 3v3 online gambit Spellcasters Chronicles, less than three months after it launched in Early Access on Steam.
In a statement, the French studio cited a “particularly challenging market environment” as the reason the release hadn’t “reached the audience needed to ensure its long-term sustainability”.
Watch on YouTubeSubscribe to Push Square on YouTube169k
A quick look at Steam concurrent player numbers reveals the title peaked at just 888 players, before dropping below 100 within weeks. At the time of writing, just 23 people are logged in.
For now, Spellcasters Chronicles will remain online until 19th June, after which its servers will be disabled. Anyone who spent money on the game will be eligible for a refund, although you will have to request it.
The Heavy Rain maker says as a result of the cancellation it’ll “undertake an internal reorganisation”, which is a euphemism for layoffs. It says this won’t affect development of Star Wars Eclipse.
But the bigger story here is perhaps how predictable this all was. Since Concord’s catastrophic failure, we’ve seen multiple online games come and go like this, and it’s surely not sustainable.
Quantic Dream is of course best known for its single player narrative games, like Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human. But since severing its relationship with Sony, it’s taken years to get the aforementioned Star Wars Eclipse off the ground, and there’s no indication it’s coming out anytime soon.
I think the industry is stuck between a rock and a hard place here, because if you look at what people are actually playing, the huge numbers all go to live service games, like Fortnite and Call of Duty.
But it’s almost impossible to break into that crowd, and we’re seeing the consequences of studios trying. ARC Raiders and Marvel Rivals are two recent titles which struck big, but for every success story there’s a dozen of flops just like this.
In an era where making single player games is getting prohibitively expensive, I honestly don’t know what the solution is. I think some people would argue in favour of smaller, cheaper games – but there’s so much choice these days, that’s not a guaranteed path to success either.
I honestly don’t know where the industry goes from me, but I also could have told you Spellcasters Chronicles would end up in this situation the moment it was announced.
If I, a mere blogger, could tell you that, then why are studios continuing to make these ridiculous bets?