Amazon yanks its embarrassing flop of a game and puts it back in beta

Digital prophets have predicted the pitiable demise of Crucible, Amazon's free team-based shooter game, since the beginning. Whether you agree with their logic or not is now besides the point as Amazon is officially taking Crucible off the digital shelves and putting it back in beta mode.

That's a tight-lipped way of saying that there is a lot of work to be done on the game.

Womp, womp — Over the past few weeks, developers for Crucible have been announcing major and minor updates for the game as evident in this particular YouTube video. It seems as if people were initially open to the notion of improvement over time. Gamers may not be known for their patience but if you promise them a good time, they'll sit tight for a bit. Now, however, it looks like the public is pretty much done with Amazon's ambitious and ultimately failure of a game idea.

At its peak right after launch on May 21, as Business Insider points out, Crucible enjoyed a paltry 25,000 concurrent players. By May 22, it had fallen off Steam's top 100 titles after fewer than 5,000 players were trying it out.

What happens now? — With Crucible in beta, players can expect the game to run like it did. For example, they won't even need to download it all over again on Steam. In the background, developers say that they will work on the roadmap for the Amazon title. If you're curious to know what it looks like, Amazon has a public-facing Trello card with details about the game.

"One of the biggest changes you’ll see is that we’re going to schedule dedicated time each week when we as devs will be playing with the community and soliciting feedback," the company added. If you haven't had the chance to play Crucible (no one can blame you for it), you can head over to Steam and check it out before 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday. We think, however, there are better things to do with your time.