The CEO of the developer behind Spectre Divide, a new free-to-play competitive multiplayer shooter fronted by streamer Shroud, has insisted the game isn’t dead despite low player concurrent numbers.
Spectre Divide launched early September on PC via Steam, where it saw an encouraging 30,971 peak concurrent players. But that concurrent figure has fallen steadily since on Valve’s platform where it has a ‘mixed’ user review rating. Yesterday, October 8, Spectre Divide had a peak of 2,769 concurrent players.
Now, a month on from launch, Mountaintop Studios CEO, Nate Mitchell acknowledged the discourse around Spectre Divide low player numbers, but vowed to stick with the game.
“Some folks out there have declared Spectre ‘dead,’ mostly as a result of low concurrency,” Mitchell said. “It’s true that Spectre’s concurrent player count is lower than we’d all like.”
Mitchell admitted that a PvP game like Spectre Divide needs lots of players for healthy matchmaking, and that without them, players will experience longer queues and less fair matches.
“With that said, I can assure you that Spectre isn’t going anywhere,” he added. “The servers aren’t shutting down, and the updates aren’t going to stop.
“If player count drops from here, we have strategies for bringing players together, like combining the matchmaking queues. And we’ll continue working toward bringing new players in. We love this game – we’ve poured our heart and soul into it these past four years – and we’re just getting started.”
Mitchell explained that Mountaintop is an independent studio with a small team, but “we have the funds to support Spectre for a long time. And I promise: We’re going to make Spectre awesome together.”
As for the future, Mitchell said the developers need some time “to go heads-down, improve the game, and tackle some of your bigger asks,” with Season 1 set to kick off in December or January. Priorities include client performance, ping and server regions, anti-cheat, and game stability.
Last month, shortly after Spectre Divide launched, Mountaintop cut 13 staff, with Mitchell saying at the time that the layoffs “make sure we’re set up to support Spectre and its community for the long term.”
Expanding on the reasoning now, Mitchell said: “We made the difficult decision to reduce our monthly spend to make sure we were set up to support Spectre for the long term. In the run up to launch, the studio grew from more than 85 devs to support a bigger live service roadmap. We’re now back to around 75 full-time devs, but we have plenty of firepower to bring our plans to life.”
As for Shroud’s ongoing involvement, Mitchell said Mountaintop is still working with the streamer on future design iterations, “and he’s been helping us think through ways to make Spectre as compelling as possible for both community members and streamers.”
But, Mitchell stressed, Spectre Divide does not belong to Shroud, as some had assumed. “The reality is that Mountaintop has been bringing Spectre to life since 2020, and the game belongs to Mountaintop,” he said.
Spectre Divide launched amid a tumultuous time for the video game market and in particular live service games. 2024 has seen a number of high-profile live service missteps, including the failure of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Sony’s Concord.
Photo by Robert Reiners/Getty Images.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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