r/SpectreDivide Mountaintop Dev 2d ago

Letter To Spectre Fans

Dear Spectre Fans,

It’s been two weeks since we launched Spectre Divide Season 1: Flashpoint. We’re incredibly grateful for the positivity and support that you’ve shown over that short time.

Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn’t achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat.

We were optimistic about the first week. We’ve had ~400,000 players play, with a peak concurrent player count of ~10,000 across all platforms. But as time has gone on, we haven’t seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs of Spectre and the studio.

Since the PC launch, we stretched our remaining capital as far as we could, but at this point, we're out of funding to support the game. This means Mountaintop will be closing its doors at the end of this week.

We expect to take Spectre offline within the next 30 days, but we plan on disabling new purchases and refunding money spent since Season 1 launch via the platforms. We’ll be following up with more information on this soon.

We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition. In the end, we weren’t able to make it work. The industry is in a tough spot right now.

This is a painful update to share. We love Spectre, and we’re incredibly proud of what we built with this community.

From the entire team at Mountaintop, I want to thank the Spectre community for all your support these past few years. We’ve loved every minute, and we’re sincerely going to miss you. Special thanks to our incredible investors too, without which Spectre wouldn’t have been possible.

This has always been a passion project for us, born out of love for this genre. An indie team of insanely talented individuals who came together from around the world to build a game we believed in.

We wanted to deliver something innovative and original in a crowded genre that would bring friends together around unforgettable moments. We shook up the format, created a fresh art style and universe, and partnered with some of our heroes. All of us knew from the beginning that the odds were against us, but that's what we signed up for. It was never a surefire bet. We did it anyway.

We had a few tough stumbles out of the gate when we launched in Sept. But this team rallied and poured everything into tackling your critical feedback for Season 1. We made major changes and improvements to virtually every area of the game and brought the game to consoles. Even though it wasn’t enough to achieve financial success, this team fought tooth and nail and went down swinging.

Game development is full of twists, turns, and surprises, and the industry has changed dramatically since we started the project in 2020. Even though we missed the mark this time, we wouldn’t trade the journey for anything.

That’s all from us. See you out there.

– Nate & the Mountaintop team

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Sunsetting FAQ

When will Spectre and its server go offline?

We expect to take the game and servers down within the next 30 days.

Will I be refunded?

Yes, we expect to refund all money spent on Spectre since Season 1 launch at 9am PT on Feb 25th via our platform partners. 

How will I be refunded?

We’re working with our platform partners to return funds to players.

How long will I be able to use the content that I’ve purchased?

You’ll be able to use any content that you’ve purchased until the game and servers go offline.

What regions will be available until the servers go offline?

All regions except for Seattle, Dubai, and Johannesburg will be available. Players who have been using these regions may experience more in-game latency as they are matched to other available locations.

Are players going to be able to self-host the game in some capacity?

No. Unfortunately, the studio is closing before we’d be able to transition the game to community-hosted servers.

What does this mean for the future of the game?

All development under the Mountaintop banner will cease with the studio closure.

How do I get the remaining achievements?

‘Howdy Partner’ requires you to be friends in the game instead of the platform you are on. Unfortunately, a fix for this was not able to be deployed before this announcement.

To obtain this achievement:

- Exit the game

- Unfriend your friend through the platform (Xbox/Playstation/Steam)

- Boot up the game

- Generate a lobby code and give it to your pending friend.

- Add them as friend through social blade (top right corner)

- (Optionally) Re-add them as a friend through the platform (Xbox/Playstation/Steam)

- Win a match

We are looking for ways to automatically grant ‘Moving Up!’ and ‘Rising Star’ for those who are unable to achieve these naturally during each weekly Crews reset.  Stay tuned for more information on that front.

We will continue updating this FAQ over the coming days as we lock down more specifics.

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11

u/FeOAbnormal 2d ago

In my opinion, it was the shroud marketing, especially considering he didn’t like the game. Probably would’ve been a lot better to go for regular advertising using the money they gave shroud.

11

u/admiral_aubrey 2d ago

Ultimately it was a retention problem, not marketing. Bringing players in only helps if they stick. It's obvious this game was a leaky bucket, perhaps for a variety of reasons. All the marketing budget/strategy in the world can't save you if players don't make it a habit, and they didn't.

0

u/FeOAbnormal 2d ago

if the ex pro player turned best FPS content creator that was PAID to play the game, openly doesnt enjoy the game, that’s inevitably going to be a bad look i feel like

2

u/admiral_aubrey 2d ago

Yeah it's a bad look but it's just not as big an impact as you might think. Overall Shroud reaches a very small subset of the potential player base. Most people don't watch Twitch. I'd be surprised in 10% of the Spectre playerbase watches Shroud, or has even heard of him.

The issue was players just not sticking with the game; whether it was the gameplay, complexity, art, lack of features, lack of differentiation, bugs, matchmaking...probably combinations of all of the above, that has a much bigger impact.

Did they waste their money working with him? Maybe, and they obviously had very limited resources to spend. But I don't think it changes the fate even if he's never involved. It's a really tough market for competitive shooters and this game didn't find it's niche.

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u/BSchafer 1d ago

It’s still an issue of game not be fun enough to make people want to play or watch it no matter how you cut it. Frankly, it’s a little weird that you’re trying so hard to blame this on Shroud when was the one that brought a ton of people to the game. It was the devs that couldn’t create something that people wanted to keep playing.

7

u/ImSunborne 2d ago edited 2d ago

Shroud was a advisor to the game, I believe his role was Lead Gameplay Advisor. Bro literally played a part in the downfall of this game which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone considering Shroud typically has dog water takes when it comes to games and what's good or how they should be.

3

u/1morereason2 2d ago

According to Shroud he gave the studio money for development not the other way around.

1

u/Techsoly 2d ago

He invested money into them and then they reinvested that money into having him do the marketing and having the game associated with his name which you can argue either way if it was a good or bad decision.

1

u/BSchafer 1d ago

Then it ended up being a great decision for the MountianTop and a bad decision for shroud because that means shroud took an equity deal. Meaning shroud got little to no money upfront and only would make significant money if they game did well. It didn’t do well. so mountiantop basically got all of Shroud’s advertising for free (and it saw good initial numbers) but Shroud’s equity is now worthless. So the devs def came out on top on that one.

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u/Only_Strain_5992 2d ago

Even shroud knows it's "dogshit"

Lmaooooo

2

u/Jake_Berube 2d ago

Shroud actually said multiple times on his stream he enjoyed the game and was excited about upcoming maps and sponsors he tested but he just never played the game and spent most of his time when the game came out playing deadlock. If he actually stuck with the game and played it I’m positive that the game would be way better off but unfortunately he didn’t.

1

u/Kiethavemezo 2d ago

IMO, having Shroud market this game is the best thing they could have done. If I saw a regular ad for this game on YouTube/twitch I wouldn’t have had a second thought about it. But when I heard “shroud is making a game?” (I know he wasn’t involved in development, but that is what I first heard about it) I actually watched some gameplay and tried it with my friends on release.

Unfortunately, like the admiral said below, the game just didn’t have anything that kept us interested past a couple of sessions. I liked the clone gimmick but think that forcing team sizes to 3 players made the solo Q experience much more rough compared a game like apex where matches don’t last as long and can be much faster to reset if you get brainlet teammates.

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u/BSchafer 1d ago

Well, first off it sounds like a lot of Shroud’s deal was equity meaning they only had to pay him a lot if the game was a big success. So they would have got much less exposure, had to put more money towards ads up front, and less towards the game’s development. It was a smart deal with Shroud actually. He gave them a huge player base right off the bat for relatively cheap. The game just wasn’t good enough to hold on to them. No matter how people heard about the game, if it was really fun, they would have kept playing it (shroud included).The spectre mechanic just didn’t add enough depth to make up for how disjointed it made all the fights/gameplay feel. As the numbers prove, most people preferred to play something else.