Earlier this week, developer Mountaintop Studios announced that it would be closing, and shutting down its debut title, Spectre: Divide, within the next 30 days. Just 6 months after the game’s initial launch, and only weeks after its arrival on PS5 and other current-gen consoles, this new 3v3 tactical shooter was officially seeing its final days.
It was an unfortunate announcement as it meant the removal of a game that some people enjoyed, and everyone at Mountaintop losing their jobs, thrust once again into a volatile and overcrowded job market. It was not a happy announcement, and served as another reminder as to just how crowded and competitive the free-to-play FPS market is.
FragPunk developer Bad Guitar Studio, however, or more accurately, its socials team, did not read the room. In a now deleted comment that X users were quick to screenshot, underneath Mountaintop’s announcement, the official FragPunk social account used a popular Captain America meme in a mocking fashion, implying that Mountaintop had “messed up,” resulting in Spectre: Divide’s shutdown, and that FragPunk had more longevity to it.
The studio has since apologized for the comment, calling it “insensitive and unprofessional.” It continued that the comment “does not reflect our studio’s values or respect for fellow industry peers.”
Game developers have come to expect unfair and harsh words from regular gamers everyday, who hide behind their computer screens and profile avatars that keep them anonymous while spewing the kind of rhetoric Bad Guitar Studio displayed here. It’s surprising, to say the least, to see it come from another game studio.
Let alone a game studio that, similar to Mountaintop, made a free-to-play FPS game that is trying to compete with every other major free-to-play FPS game.
Mountaintop Studios was also an independent team, developing and publishing Spectre: Divide on its own. Bad Guitar Studio is a subsidiary of Thunderfire Games, which is a subsidiary of NetEase Games, one of the world’s biggest game publishers and developers. Bad Guitar’s comment on Mountaintop’s closure couldn’t have been punching down more if it tried.
And that’s all before considering the other aspect to all of this, that Bad Guitar Studio could find itself in a similar position to Mountaintop within a year. With the backing of NetEase, it’s likely that FragPunk will be given more runway than Mountaintop could have given Spectre: Divide, but anyone following FPS games in the last few years knows that having the backing of a big publisher and/or parent company does nothing to stop a studio and/or a new game from being shut down.
XDefiant was shut down by Ubisoft within one year of it launching. SEGA cancelled Hyena’s before it could even release, and of course no one will soon forget Sony’s shut down of Concord.
Those are just a few of the many examples of games from big publishers/developers that struggled to, or barely got the chance to, compete with the juggernauts of the genre like Call of Duty, Valorant, Apex Legends and Counter-Strike. You could also potentially add Marvel Rivals to that list, another game that’s in NetEase’s portfolio.
FragPunk is currently enjoying a strong launch, with 73,166 players in-game at time of writing, after only arriving on PC this past March 6, 2025. It is said to be on consoles “within the next two months,” according to the FAQ on its website.
That’s all great news for Bad Guitar and NetEase, for now. We’ll see how it’s doing in a year’s time.
Source – [Bad Guitar Studio]
