After just one year, Yager has announced The Cycle: Frontier is shuttering due to cheaters. Yager, who’s worked on Spec Ops: The Line, revealed the news “with a heavy heart” and said it will offer refunds after the shutdown.
Prospectors,
Today’s news we share with a heavy heart.
The Cycle: Frontier will shut down on September 27, 2023.
Making this decision was very difficult for us, but ultimately was a necessary one.
More information about this, as well as refunds, our final patch, and more 👇 pic.twitter.com/w1Nji3Lxp4
— The Cycle: Frontier (@TheCycleGame) June 28, 2023
In a blog post, the team details what led to this decision, apologizing for the state of Season 3 and then announcing The Cycle: Frontier will sunset on September 27, 2023.
First, there wasn’t enough interest to remain “financially viable,” despite the studio’s best efforts, it could not bring in the needed players to sustain itself. The earlier Alphas and Beta were good for the team, and there was interest from streamers who would play The Cycle: Frontier in front of their big audiences, leading to servers being overwhelmed, a “very good problem to have,” as it were.
However, things began to run amok, with challenges beginning to mount, including cheaters playing the game.
“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,” Yager said. “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 then didn’t drum up enough buzz to get people back into the game, and the current state of The Cycle: Frontier was not in the state Yager wanted, so they needed to fix this issue. Season 3 would launch and saw an uptick in players, but once again, not enough to keep things going.
On September 27, servers go offline, and the studio is looking at a way to make the game playable online.
The team considered making the game available to everyone who wants to use a private server but ultimately decided it wouldn’t work. “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 mentions.
Refunds will also be offered to every player who made a purchase on The Cycle: Frontier in the past 14 days (from June 14, 2023, at 3 AM ET).
