Amazon might be the largest online retailer in the world, but the company’s had its fair share of fails along the way.
Of course, the world of business is all about risk-taking and sometimes they simply don’t pay off.
Take Apple, for example; the technology company spent billions of dollars trying to develop a product to rival Elon Musk, only for it to be scrapped after 10 years having never seen the light of day.
And in the 80s, The Coca-Cola Company spent $34 million making a major change to its popular soft drink which sparked a major backlash.
Amazon, meanwhile, has been diversifying for years, seeing major success with the likes of grocery delivery service Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime Video.
But its attempt to break into the online gaming market was met with a pretty spectacular failure not all too long ago.
The Jeff Bezos-owned company launched its first AAA video game – the gaming equivalent of a ‘blockbuster’ movie – back in May 2020.
Crucible was a ‘free-to-play multiplayer third-person shooter,’ developed by Amazon Game Studio and its subsidiary Relentless Studios.
Previously, the company’s main focus had been on tablet games, so this new venture was a pretty big deal.
Development of the game began in 2014 and Crucible was released on Windows on May 20, 2020.
But some 31 days later, on June 30, the game returned to a closed beta status.
So, the game was no longer open to the public and only a select group of game testers could access it.
Five months down the line, on October 9, 2020, Relentless Studios announced that Crucible‘s development would be discontinued within a month.
Crucible shut down because ‘the dev team is moving on to work on New World and other Amazon Games projects,’ an end-of-development FAQ on the Amazon Games site claimed.
While the exact sum of money Amazon spent on Crucible was never disclosed, it can cost up to $80 million to develop an AAA game, according to estimates from Juego Studios.
Fortunately, Amazon saw success with New World – although the game’s release was pushed back twice, until September 28 2021.
The massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) has since been developed and released for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S under the title New World: Aeternum was released, which included huge game updates for existing PC users.
And in December, an Amazon Prime TV adaptation, New World: The Once and Future King, was released as an episode of sci-fi animation Secret Level, featuring the voices of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Pacey and Gabriel Luna.
Steam Revenue Calculator predicts New World: Aeternum ‘made $700,132,251.84 in gross revenue since its release’.
I suppose Crucible walked so that New World could run…
