The Cycle: Frontier is Shutting Down in September

The Cycle: Frontier, which came out in June 2022, will shut down in September. The  raid-themed extraction first-person shooter will close despite having active players, as  itis “unfortunately not financially viable”.

The last day will be September 27th, and the team is laying out just what we can expect between now and the day  the service closes.  The announcement also takes us through the decision-making process and how they came to the decision to completely shut down the game little more than a year after launch.

“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,” the devs note. Acknowledging some challenges, they also emphasize one big impact in particular, “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 they improved their systems, the playerbase had significantly decreased and continued efforts to make the game more approachable and available didn't have the impact they needed to make The Cycle: Frontier financially viable.

So what now?

All purchases have been halted and bundles have been pulled from Steam and the Epic Games Store. As of today, you can no longer download the game from the Epic Games Store, but you can add the game to your library and install it on Steam if you want to take a look around before service ends. Those who have played via the Epic Games Store can continue to play.

If you still have in-game currency, they've decided to continue rotating shop stock but slash all prices by 95%. The team is also granting the premium version of the Season 3 Fortuna Pass to everyone. They are also boosting progression. Finally, anyone who made a purchase in the past 14 days from June 14th through today, the team will be offering refunds.

One of the things the team does note is they considered making the game available for others after the shutdown to perhaps run a private server or to have some kind of offline access, but they decided against it for practical reasons. 

There's more detail available in the last patch notes detailing the changes, increased rewards, progression boosts and everything else designed to make the final  months as fun and playable as possible.