In late September, the PvPvE survival shooter The Cycle: Frontier will be shut down.
The Cycle: Frontier, a multiplayer shooter available for free to play, will permanently go down on September 27 according to developer Yager Development.
One of the reasons given by the developer for the shutdown was an intriguing one: cheaters degraded the experience for everyone.
Yager announced the sad news on the game’s Steam website on June 29. Yager stated that despite the team’s best efforts, the project was no longer “financially viable” and added that cheaters were equally to blame.
Why is The Cycle: Frontier being discontinued?
“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,” According to Yager. “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 The Cycle: Frontier 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, [plenty of folks] had already been affected and as a result we saw a significant decrease in our player base.”
The Cycle: Frontier is a survival multiplayer shooter that puts players against other players and the environment (PvPvE), and it was created by the same team that created the cherished third-person game Spec Ops: The Line.
As a Prospector, it is your duty to set out on expeditions on the extraterrestrial planet Fortuna III to acquire resources and riches in an effort to escape with your loot before monsters trample you to death.
The idea is intriguing—it combines elements of Borderlands and Escape From Tarkov with squad-based gameplay similar to Apex Legends.
Unfortunately, all of that will soon be meaningless because the game will stop working in a few months.
Even players were dissatisfied, as evidenced by The Cycle: Frontier’s “mixed” Steam rating, which shows users complaining that while the game was enjoyable and benefited from a number of upgrades, it ultimately couldn’t escape the hackers who were hellbent on killing people almost immediately.
Kotaku contacted Yager Development for a response.
What lies ahead for The Cycle: Frontier?
Players of Epic Games won’t be able to install the game any longer, but Steam users will be allowed to do so, according to the official website. Regardless, The Cycle: Frontier is still available to everyone who has it through September 27.
Before the game goes offline, refunds will apparently be automatically handled, and new content updates will stop being posted on the official communication channels (Discord, Twitter, etc.). In the meantime, Yager will use the knowledge it has gained to “new projects” that it hasn’t yet disclosed.
This information indicates that The Cycle: Frontier may soon join the roughly 40 games that have already been canceled this year owing to, among other things, declining player bases, a lack of funds and resources, and licenses that are about to expire.
The Cycle: Frontier’s abrupt closure is part of a larger trend: creating and maintaining games requires time and money, and sometimes creators run out of both. But the choice to discontinue the extraction shooter in September stinks for preservation and for the devoted player community.