Boasting a massive budget, veteran talent sniped from some of the top gaming studios, and a gameplay experience tailor-made for Twitch streaming, Crucible represents Amazon's first major effort to break into the gaming industry as a first-party developer.
Presumably tired of just raking in all the money from third-part video games sales, Amazon, which straight-up owns Twitch, is hoping to replace streamer-favorite games like Fortnite, Overwatch, and League of Legends with their own. This is a major red flag for the future of video game streaming. A major company that controls advertisement space and means of distribution will most likely not play fair when they have their own content on the line, too. Amazon has already screwed over plenty of small business in all sorts of market spaces, and with their plans to create a cloud-based video game platform, it seems obvious that they're gearing up for a not-so-discreet monopoly in video games, too.
All of which is to say, Crucible needs to fail. Thankfully, it already is.
Amazon can pour all the advertising money into Crucible that they want, but they can't force gamers to play it.
Despite Crucible's decently positive reviews from critics thus far, the game appears to be a total flop amongst its targeted player base. Barely one week after its heavily hyped release, the game has almost no audience on Twitch. Crucible streams currently only have around 600 total viewers (compared to something like Fortnite, which has 210,000). As Kotaku's Zack Zwiezen noted, "That puts it below games like the original EverQuest (first released in 1999), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), and something called Anime Land."
This is very funny, but it's also worth mentioning how pathetic it is, considering Amazon paid well-known streamers to promote it and also the fact that it's a free, big-budget game released during quarantine when many gamers are literally just home looking for new games to play. In other words, Crucible simply isn't appealing to anyone. There are so many great games to play, stream, and enjoy right now that transitioning to a bland-looking, Amazon-funded trojan horse isn't even mildly appealing—even if it is "free."
Also, Jeff Bezos can eat sh*t.