Yager sunsetting The Cycle: Frontier after cheaters cause irreparable damage

gamedeveloper.com:

Yager is shutting down its PvPvE extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier after just over a year.

The Tencent-owned studio, which has previously worked on titles including Spec Ops: The Line and Dreadnought, said it has to face up to the reality that The Cycle isn't financially viable. As a result, the company will be sunsetting the shooter 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," said the studio in a blog post.

Elaborating on how it ended up here, Yager said The Cycle delivered "decent results" across multiple closed alphas and betas, and quickly surpassed all expectations when it launched in June last year.

"Big streamers caught wind of the game and started playing it before hundreds of thousands of viewers. Players started flocking en masse towards The Cycle: Frontier, which caused our servers to blow up and forced us to urgently upscale our infrastructure. In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good problem to have," it added. "All in all, things were looking up for The Cycle: Frontier even though we still had a long road ahead of us."

Despite hitting the ground running, Yager struggled to deal with a surge in cheaters during The Cycle's formative months, resulting in a "significant decrease in our player base." It then failed to kickstart the title again with the launch of Season 2, leaving it questioning whether the state of The Cycle at that time was actually representative of its initial vision.

"That’s why we announced the end of global mandatory wipes, along with the introduction of free loadout runs, loadout presets and changes to the early game experience, all in an effort to make the game