Amazon's '$80,000,000 mistake' that lead to six years of work come to an end in 31 days

Amazon are known for their savvy business decisions, but a step into an unfamiliar market led to an '$80,000,000 mistake' that went up in smoke after just 31 days.

Ever since Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 the online marketplace has been on an upward trend, and currently sits as the fifth most valuable company in the world according to CompaniesMarketCap, with a staggering market cap of $2,319,000,000.

While Bezos has come close to decisions that would have sent the company into bankruptcy according to insiders, and he has no problem splashing his own fortune on multi-million dollar yachts, there is one major black mark on Amazon's recent dealings that they'd rather we all forgot about.

Not everything can be as wildly successful as Amazon Fresh or Prime Video, but Amazon's first foray into the world of AAA video game development didn't exactly go to plan.

The company revealed Amazon Game Studios' three initial major titles at Twichcon 2016, and it was Crucible - a third-person free-to-play multiplayer shooter - that would first see the light of day, launching in May 2020.

Jeff Bezos won't look back too fondly on Amazon Game Studios' first big project (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

It's unclear exactly how much Amazon invested into the development of the title, but with an average budget of around $60 million to $80 million for a triple A title it's bound to have not been cheap.

Despite the pandemic being an incredibly fruitful period for gaming, as many multiplayer titles saw record player counts due to the increased number of people sat at home with nothing else to do, this wasn't a fruitful period for Crucible and Amazon Games.

It took just 31 days for the game to return to a closed beta status, locking access to the title for all but a select few, and only five months after release it was announced that development would be shortly suspended.

While the official word from Amazon is that Crucible ceased development as resources were moved to New World and other Amazon Games projects, its clear that the success, or lack thereof, was the clear motivating factor.

While it might not have helped that Crucible released on the same day as Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing New Horizons - the latter of which dominated many gamers lives during the pandemic - it simply might not just have been good enough to draw attention, garnering average scores for a wide range of media outlets.

Crucible failed to capture an audience at a time when player counts were higher than ever (Relentless Studios/Amazon Games)

According to SteamDB data, which tracks player counts on the PC storefront, Crucible did manage to hit an all-time peak of 25,145 players at release, but this quickly shrunk to just 1,714 players in the following month. The past three years have seen a peak player count of just 4.

Thankfully for Amazon their games division has seen a number of high-profile successes in the years following Crucible's major flop, with the aforementioned New World, Lost Ark, and Throne and Liberty all qualifying as major wins.

Lost Ark currently holds the fifth highest all-time player count peak on SteamDB for any game with 1,325,305 players, and New World isn't too far behind with an all-time peak of 913,634.

All three have managed to maintain thousands of daily active players in the years following their launches though, which is a sign of huge success for the multiplayer titles and has likely made up for the Crucible-shaped hole in Amazon's accounts.