Greetings, Prospectors.
Today we sadly have to deliver difficult news that we are sharing with a rather heavy heart.
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.
You will find additional details on our reasoning, changes to monetization, and all the upcoming steps towards the sunset in this announcement.
The story of The Cycle: Frontier
When we started developing TC:F we wanted to:
“Offer an approachable F2P extraction shooter, where FPS fans of varying skill experience a satisfying balancing of tense high-stakes gameplay and rewarding progression.”
We first had two closed Alphas and Betas, with decent results. But we were not prepared for what happened next, as our final Beta and official release have been met with incredible success and enthusiasm. 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.
All in all, things were looking up for The Cycle: Frontier even though we still had a long road ahead of us.
The general behavior with online games after a good launch is a couple of nice weeks, then a dwindling interest, until stabilization after a few months. During perhaps one of the most important periods of a live game, we faced many challenges. One of them and perhaps the most crucial one was the increasing number of cheaters shortly after TC:F went live. 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. 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 didn’t generate enough attention to kickstart the game again, therefore we’ve critically reviewed if the current state of The Cycle: Frontier was in line with our initial vision. In a word, it wasn’t, so we needed to correct our course. 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 more approachable. Just to be clear, this seemed to convince many players, and we saw an increase in our success metrics with the release of Season 3. Unfortunately it was still not enough to make The Cycle: Frontier financially viable.
Therefore, we are saddened to announce that The Cycle: Frontier will permanently shut down its servers on September 27, 2023.
What’s happening now
In the meantime, we will apply a few changes to the game and its dynamic, to make sure everyone can enjoy everything The Cycle: Frontier has to offer. These include the following:
- You will not be able to spend money on The Cycle: Frontier before the servers close. We are also removing our bundles and Aurum packs from Steam.
- On Steam, players who don't yet have the game in their libraries will still be able to install it, and everyone is able to play the game until the end of service on September 27, 2023.
- The Special Offers in the in-game shop will still rotate daily and weekly but every item will receive a 95% discount or more.
- The Premium version of Season 3's Fortuna Pass will be granted to everyone for free upon login. Levels can still be skipped but at a discounted price.
- We are making our progression faster than ever.
- All details available in our patch notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/868270/view/3685682069187446227
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 3am EDT / 9am CEST). Please check out our FAQ page for full details on that.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/868270/view/3685681434322936968
Also note that we will still provide customer support service until September 27.
Last point, we strongly considered making the game available to everyone, so that it can be enjoyed offline and possibly on private servers. Unfortunately, we had to come to the conclusion this wasn’t feasible. 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.
What’s next
Working on The Cycle: Frontier has been an invaluable experience for YAGER. We were presented with the amazing opportunity to work on a unique project and on a large-scale online game. We also were fortunate to make the acquaintance and talk to many of you, to countless players, creators, and other developers.
This experience will not go to waste, of that we can assure you. We are making sure to learn as much as we can from everything that went right and, perhaps more importantly, from all our mistakes and shortcomings.
We will now shift our focus to new projects using all the valuable experience, learnings, and feedback we’ve gathered. Make sure to sign up to our newsletter, follow our official Steam page, and to keep an eye on our official website.
One very last point we want to mention: we are incredibly grateful for all your support and dedication. We do think we’ve created something beautiful but none of this would, or even could, have happened without each and every one of you. We are proud of our community, wish you all the best in your future endeavors and we hope to see you all again. Enjoy your time on Fortuna III and, as always, and now more than ever, don’t forget...
… Fortuna Favors the Bold!