Tactical Shooter Promoted By Shroud Shutting Down Just A Year After $30 Million Investment

Spectre Divide is a neat tactical shooter that struggled after server issues at launch, mixed reviews on Steam, and $90 shop skins that rankled some players. It’s now shutting down less than a month after coming to consoles and just over a year after securing $30 million in investment funding.

“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,” Mountaintop Studios CEO Nate Mitchell wrote in an announcement on Wednesday evening. “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.”

Released last September on PC and promoted in association with former Counter-Strike pro and 2019 content creator of the year, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, Spectre Divide’s unique twist on the tactical shooter formula was the ability for each player to deploy two fighters onto the battlefield at once and then swap between them while setting or diffusing explosives.

It was a cool idea with a colorful art style that probably needed more runway to iterate and evolve in response to player feedback. Unfortunately, despite a $30 million investment round as recently as January 2024 and a influx of new players with the recent launch of season 1: Flashpoint on consoles, Spectre Divide didn’t even live long enough to see its one-year anniversary.

“We were optimistic about the first week,” Mitchell wrote. “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.”

Mountaintop Studios, which boasted veteran talent from Naughty Dog, Respawn Entertainment, and other AAA studios, employed over 70 staff according to LinkedIn. “We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition,” Mitchell wrote. “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.”