Spectre Divide is the latest tactical shooter to enter the lucrative and cutthroat live service video game market. It should have had a promising launch, but an early controversy has already harmed its reputation.
Spectre Divide is getting heavy marketing as the game that was made by esports player and streamer Shroud, AKA Michael Grzesiek. While Shroud, who became famous for competing in Valorant and Counter-Strike 2, is Spectre Divide’s lead gameplay advisor, he is really only part of a team called Mountaintop Studios
Spectre Divide distinguishes itself from the pack with its Duality system. Basically you choose two characters to play, and you can freely switch between them. Both your characters can die even if you can only control them one at a time. But the game allows you to keep going with just one character, opening up the field to strategize using two characters, in a game where everyone has that same ability.
As reported by PC Gamer, the game launched earlier this week to immediate uproar. The issue is the prices of their microtransactions. The Cry Kinesis bundle seems to be the flagship item at launch, and it’s very indicting for Mountaintop that it is.
At $ 90, literally 1.5 x more than what gamers are used to spending on a single retail video game, Mountaintop gives you blue “cryo” FX on four guns, and makes your handaxe glow blue. Gamers are complaining on how steep the price of this item is in relation to what you actually get.
The thing is, Riot Games has similarly egregious pricing for microtransactions on Valorant. So one can argue that Mountaintop Studios is following Riot’s lead, and that it’s reasonable for them to expect fans to accept it.
As it turns out, Spectre Divide players did not accept it. As a result, Mountaintop Studios just dropped the prices on all their microtransactions between 17 to 25 %. The aforementioned Cry Kinesis bundle, for example, is now down to $ 75.
Spectre Divide’s game director, Lee Horn, also offered an apology:
“We love our free players deeply, but we also have to pay for the servers they play on (as well as the massive initial and ongoing cost of development), so the ‘freeness’ comes at a cost to us.
Being a new, fully independent studio with limited resources is tricky. We’re self-publishing, so every dollar you spend directly funds Spectre and makes the game better everyday. So we took a swing that we thought would best set us up to support the game. Turns out we swung a bit high, so we are adjusting to be better in line with your feedback.”
So Spectre Divide has started off on the wrong foot, but that’s not going to make it the next Concord. The First Descendant similarly faced jitters upon its launch, but there was enough going on in the game that the fans kept playing. Now, its developer Nexon has a foot into the global live service market.
Success is not guaranteed in this genre, as Sony’s first success in this field, Helldivers 2, is already facing struggles in retaining and winning back their players. Subsequently, reports have gone around that Ubisoft has scared XDefiant team into getting their player numbers back up. Mountaintop Studios is going to have to work harder to get Spectre Divide back from having a bad reputation, to at least being popular and addictive enough, that that reputation no longer matters.
