Despite only having been released midway through 2022, YAGER has announced that it will be shutting down The Cycle: Frontier on September 27th, 2023, ceasing all operations and pulling the game offline once and for all.
The Cycle: Frontier was revealed back in 2018, and it found its way into an Early Access state in 2019, before being released in full on June 8th, 2022. It had broad visions of challenging the likes of Escape From Tarkov in the extraction shooter arena, but ultimately, those plans fell flat, player numbers dwindled, and interest in the game faltered.
The Cycle Ends
In an emotional sunset announcement, developer YAGER revealed that The Cycle: Frontier will be shut down in September 2023 because it simply cannot afford to keep it running:
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.
As a free-to-play game, The Cycle: Frontier was already in a precarious place when it was released. In the announcement, YAGER explained that the game suffered from an influx of cheaters that it struggled to deal with, and by the time it had onboarded anti-cheat mechanics, most of the community had quite literally fled the game.
Despite that, YAGER pushed on with The Cycle, but subsequent releases of new seasons and updates still failed to pull in a sustainable, consistent user base. If we look at some statistics available online, we can see that:
- On Twitch, viewership fell from a peak of 99,090 when the game went live to just a 456 average in the last seven days (at the time of publishing)
- On SteamCharts, the all-time peak went from 40,690 players to just 2,400 in the last 24 hours (at the time of publishing)
From here on out, bundles and ‘Aurum packs’ on Steam will be unavailable to purchase, but the game will remain open for installation until September 27th, 2023. There will be a continuation of ‘Special Offers’ in the in-game store, and these will be heavily discounted, and for any players logging in over the next three months, the ‘Fortuna Pass’ (read: Season Pass) will be free to obtain.
Will you miss The Cycle: Frontier?
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