The Berlin development studio Yager is discontinuing its online shooter “The Cycle: Frontier”, which was released in 2022. The servers will be shut down on September 27th, Yager announced – after that “The Cycle” will no longer be playable. The stores are already removing the ability to spend money on in-game transactions of the Free2Play game. Anyone who has spent money on in-game items in the past two weeks can request a refund.
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“The Cycle” fell short of expectations, the studio writes in a blog entry. The launch was initially successful, and server capacity even had to be increased due to the influx of players. But then the number of players collapsed, which was partly due to cheaters.
Measures came too late
“In what is perhaps one of the most important phases of a live game, we faced many challenges,” writes Yager. “One of these, and perhaps the most crucial, was the increasing number of cheaters shortly after the launch of The Cycle: Frontier. While we had the tools and measures in place, we quickly realized that we needed to improve our anti-cheat measures in order to to ensure a fair gaming experience for all players.”
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However, according to Yager, the anti-cheat measures took effect too late: Many players had already jumped out by the time they were implemented. In the later course of the game it was not possible to turn the rudder around again. Even a slight increase in “success metrics” after the release of season 3 was not enough to make “The Cycle” financially viable. “The Cycle” holds a meager user rating of 61 percent on Steam – with a very impressive number of 44,000 reviews. Yager now wants to devote himself to a new project.
The eternal fight against cheaters
The case of “The Cycle” shows once again why major development studios take the fight against cheaters so seriously. Activision announced last fall that 500,000 cheats have already been kicked out of its Call of Duty games and had their accounts suspended. Companies like Activision and Electronic Arts often use kernel-level anti-cheat tools to deal with cheaters.
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Although these are unpopular in the community, they are apparently the lesser evil for many studios. Negative experiences when playing online games due to cheaters deter newcomers and in the medium term can lead to fewer players and servers dying out. This downward spiral is problematic for the developers: Their multiplayer titles are usually financed primarily through repeated additional payments from the active players and should therefore remain alive for as long a period of time as possible.
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