Crucible, Stadia and Why Amazon and Google Are In Gaming For The Wrong Reasons

Editor’s Note: This article has been edited and revised in response to reader feedback. Credit and citation in the form of additional links have been incorporated where necessary.

Last week, Amazon Game Studios announced that it would be withdrawing its arena shooter, Crucible, from general release on Steam and putting it back into closed beta. The game launched to such widespread indifference that it prompted Amazon to opt into its own return policy. Development will continue but new players will no longer be able to sign up, making the game exclusive to a small audience of existing players.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before. Online shooters like Lawbreakers, Paragon, Battleborn and Evolve have all been met with the kind of indifference and anemic player growth that forced them to shut down. Regardless, it’s an embarassing turn of events for Amazon Game Studios, as Crucible was meant to herald the online commerce giant’s entry into core gaming. And while it’s easy to dunk on Crucible, no amount of hindsight could suggest that Crucible was an assured failure.

Amazon Game Studios secured a solid roster of development talent, put them to work on the Amazon Lumberyard engine – a variant of the generally well regarded CryEngine – and had the deep pockets to make a decent budget easy to greenlight. What emerged from there was a boring, derivative game that launched with a weak number of quality of life considerations and very little measures in place to prevent bad matchmaking experiences.

It is incredible that Crucible is the best that a trillion dollar company can manage. By doing very little in terms of marketing and building awareness for it, Amazon pretty much ensured an utter lack of interest in the game. Simply put, what distinguishes Crucible from other also-fail shooters is Amazon itself.

Amazon is in gaming for the wrong reason. That reasoning is entirely utilitarian, it operates a cloud service platform – Amazon Web Services (AWS) – and games happen to be a great way to leverage those services. They want to make games to increase the reach of the AWS backend. That ulterior motive is reflected entirely in their deep-seated disinterest in games at the highest levels of the company.

It’s a similar situation to another dot com giant that’s made a play for games: Google. When the search engine stalwart launched their cloud gaming platform, Stadia, it was derided as an “in-beta” service with prohibitive pricing and starving for content. Even before it was launched, the warning signs were there when Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled the platform and declared, “I’m not a big gamer.”

I derive amusement from weird media gimmicks but this launch ad for Google Stadia starring comedian Reggie Watts never really made a convincing argument for it.

It’s not a criminal statement, but it set the tone for Stadia. Even the tech commentariat noted that Stadia felt like a bolt-on extension of YouTube and Google Search and an indication that it existed to serve the other pillars of their business, rather than a sincere commitment to shake things up for gaming.

And for as long as their goal is not "make great games people will love" but "fulfill performance goals related to other segments of the company" it will be difficult for them to harness their studios energy towards games and services of interest to actual gamers. No amount of billions in the world is going to make their games successful if they are just peripheral to other goals.

Amazon can recruit great talent, harness the energy of experienced studios and license proven technology, but they need to let them chart their own course and not follow a design by committee playbook. It’s what works for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

Meanwhile Google failed to consider that delivery mechanisms for games is not inherently exciting, no matter how innovative, especially when the technicals begin to interfere with the experience. It’s when they’re invisible – which is to say providing frictionless access to games content – that they succeed.

Setbacks like these aren’t unique to Google. Microsoft’s Xbox division has fought tooth and nail to protect their mission from inside the company. It wasn’t until the Xbox One launch, with its ill-considered pivot towards television, that they were able to justify better footing for a gaming brand. The result? A better compromise between games and the company’s broader ambitions for the Azure cloud.

Until Amazon and Google can resolve these conflicting interests, they’ll be unable to find the balance to make some truly great games and services.

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