Unfortunately, it became a problem. While Valorant launched with a nearly identical set of features, from the perspective of players, Spectre Divide wasn’t competing against what Valorant shipped with; it was competing against what Valorant had grown towards over the course of five years.
On top of that, Shroud’s involvement in the game, while helping with development, sowed some confusion among potential players.
“The expectations from players, given Shroud’s involvement, didn’t match our capabilities as an indie dev,” Mitchell said. “That was our fault: we miscommunicated what players should expect at launch.”
Other players also seemed to think that any money the game made was going directly to Shroud, rather than supporting the development team that worked on the title.
Ultimately, in a world of early access and service games, it’s up to developers and publishers to set reasonable expectations.
“This was also our first launch; we were a new studio and self-published,” Hansen said. “There’s always going to be a challenge of threading that needle of we believe this is a true 1.0 for our game, and this is the start of our game, and we have tons of awesome things to come.
If he were to do it over again, Hansen said, perhaps the studio would have launched the game much earlier, so it would have been even less polished, and it would have been clear what players were getting and where the title was in development. The studio would have been more transparent, earlier about what was in the game at launch, and when other things were arriving.
Another hard-learned lesson from the release was the need for more media coverage. With a small window between the game’s beta and launch, most gaming sites decided not to cover the launch. It was, Hansen believes, too close to their beta coverage.
When it comes to that much-needed exposure from journalists, sometimes you only get one chance.
The coverage of the beta was glowing, Hansen points out. And he’s right: sites were calling it a breath of fresh air, a fascinating Valorant-like shooter, a testament to how creative a shooter can be. In comparison, coverage of the game’s actual release was relatively muted.
“What we showed during the closed beta and what we showed for the launch wasn’t different enough to have a new article written about it,” he said. “You need to have some space between those two times and something materially different from what they have already played, so there is something new to write about.
“Our closed beta was our big media beat, and we didn’t know that was going to be the case. We thought when we launched, we would get all of these new articles.”
Finally, the two still struggle with what he thinks was one of the most significant early issues: the timing of the game’s release.
In 2024, the studio faced a difficult decision: either ship the game a bit earlier than they would have liked or hold it until 2025. They knew that releasing Spectre Divide into the holiday crush of the video game release calendar was a non-starter. It had to be before or after.
Before meant spending post-release time finishing up some of the features they knew players would want. Releasing after would mean figuring out a way to stay afloat for another four or five months with no money coming in.
“It’s really tough,” Hansen said. “We’re supporting a studio of 100 people at this point because you have to be ready for success, so we were structured for success.
“But we wouldn’t have been able to support that size team until 2025.”
Mitchell agreed: “We didn’t have a good choice.”
But there’s one other thing he’s thought about quite a bit since the game’s early demise.
“Our game needed to stand on its own, you know?” he explained. “It had to be differentiated enough. It had to be fun enough that players would give it time to grow naturally. And it didn’t have that for some reason.
“In a parallel universe where we didn’t have the server issues, where the community wasn’t frustrated with our early pricing that rankled people, where maybe we had a bit more money for marketing, we could have gotten the critical mass going.”
Looking introspectively, Mitchell harshly judges what came of the game and studio, saying he thinks they just weren’t able to get the game to where it was good enough, different enough, or fun enough.
“Our retention was good, but top of funnel, the number of players coming in each day just wasn’t as much as it should have been,” he said. “It’s my job to make sure we were building the right thing, and we were just off the mark a little bit.”
