Spec Ops: The Line dev's free-to-play shooter The Cycle: Frontier shutting down

eurogamer.net:

Yager, the developer behind the likes of Spec Ops: The Line and Dreadnought, has announced its free-to-play PvPvE extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier will be shutting down in September, as the game is not «financially viable».

The Cycle: Frontier, which arrived on PC in June last year, saw teams of players — in the role of Prospectors — airdropping onto a hostile alien planet in order to gather resources, fending off predators and competing teams with a steadily expanding arsenal, then whizzing back into space at the end with all their spoils.

The game has seen three seasons of updates since its launch last summer, but Yager has now announced development is coming to an end, with The Cycle: Frontier's most recent patch being its last.

«Today we sadly have to deliver difficult news that we are sharing with a rather heavy heart,» the developer wrote in its announcement post. «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.

»This brings us to the heartbreaking announcement: The Cycle: Frontier will be sunset on September 27, 2023. This is a very hard decision for us, but after debating it for a long while, we had to accept this is the best course of action for Yager."

In a more extended retrospective on the game's successes and struggles, Yager also noted one of its major challenges was a sharp increate in cheaters after launch — a spike it was unable to address rapidly enough, resulting in a «significant decrease» in players. The arrival of Season 2 wasn't enough to reverse the game's fortunes, and while subsequent changes to The Cycle's caused an «increase in our