Spectre: Divide was a new 3v3 first-person shooter from a brand new team called Mountaintop Studios, a team built from the ground-up with veteran FPS developers, each of them with the goal of making something truly unique with Spectre Divide.
That was last year, when Spectre Divide was making its debut to the world with the help of popular streamer Shroud, who worked closely with the development team to support and work on the game. The hook? A new take on a classic Valorant or Counter-Strike style shooter where players controller two bodies, with two loadouts, that you could quickly swap between.
It was like being able to jump from one side of the map to the other through a portal, opening up plenty of new tactical options for players. Unfortunately for Spectre Divide however, not even the clout of a big streamer could keep players coming back.
On Wednesday evening, the studio announced that it had essentially run out of money, and could not stay afloat any longer. Mountaintop Studios will close by the end of this week, and Spectre Divide will be taken offline at some point within the next 30 days.
“Since the PC launch, we stretched our remaining capital as far as we could,” the studio wrote in a statement published on X. “But at this point, we’re out of funding to support the game. This means Mountaintop will be closing its doors at the end of the 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. We’ll be following up with more information on this soon. We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition. 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.”
Spectre Divide only recently arrived on PS5 and other console platforms with its Season 1 launch, and prior to that we took a look at the PC version for a preview when it was first being showcased.
Even then, as we were excited by what we saw, we were concerned with whether or not Spectre: Divide could swim in such a competitive market.
This is what our previewer wrote back in August 2024:
“Mountaintop Studios may be comprised of a bunch of veteran developers, but they’re an independent studio publishing Spectre: Divide on their own. It’s a huge task to keep a live service game like this going, and keep the quality of new content at the same high bar it seems to be launching with.
At least its free-to-play approach gives it the chance to grow with no financial barrier for players to check it out. I just hope it’s able to make the waves necessary for it to continue to grow and find its way to all platforms, with its own sustainable slice of the FPS market-pie carved out.”
Call us prescient if you want, but it doesn’t take supernatural powers to look at the current landscape and understand that Spectre: Divide would have needed to make massive waves to keep the studio and the game going. In the end, it didn’t even last a full year.
Source – [Mountaintop Studios]
