Crossfire: Legion was released in 2022 and is an RTS based on a multi-million dollar brand. But it failed to achieve success and will soon disappear forever.
Crossfire is hardly known to anyone in this country, but in China and South Korea, the brand is huge. There, people know it as one of the biggest free-to-play shooters ever, played by millions. It’s exactly what Counter-Strike would be in this country.
Developer Smilegate has been trying to bring Crossfire to the West for some time now, and on paper, the plans sounded good. Instead of competing with established shooters here, the real-time strategy game Crossfire: Legion was supposed to introduce the universe to PC gamers. The RTS was developed by genre experts Blackbird, a studio consisting mainly of former Relic developers who worked on Homeworld back in the day and continue to do so today.
The game certainly seemed like a spiritual successor to RTS legends such as Command & Conquer and Starcraft. But now the plan has officially failed. The team recently announced that Crossfire: Homeworld has been canceled.steampowered.com/news/app/1072190/view/502830889625976839“ data-icon=‘external’>that Crossfire: Legion will soon disappear completely from Steam.
Crossfire: Legion is coming to an end
A radical step, but not a surprising one. The RTS has been recording abysmal player numbers since its early access launch in May 2022. According to Steamdb, at no point have more than 400 people played simultaneously.
Shortly after its release, player numbers plummeted to around 30 per day, and only the 1.0 release provided a tiny boost. Now, at best, maybe two to six people play every day. On August 18, the game will be removed from the store entirely. The team had this to say in a brief statement:
Greetings Commanders,
It is with deep regret that we must inform you that we will be discontinuing active development and support for Crossfire: Legion.
As part of this process, Crossfire: Legion will be removed from the Steam store on August 18 at 6:00 p.m. PDT and will no longer be available for new purchases. However, players who already own the game will continue to have full access to it via their Steam library.
As there will be no future updates or technical support, multiplayer functionality may decline over time or become unavailable in the future. Refunds will be handled in accordance with Steam’s refund policy.
We thank you for all your support over the years. It has been an incredible journey – one that we could not have taken without you.
There are many reasons for Crossfire’s failure. Overall, real-time strategy is now a genre that rarely really flourishes. It’s not without reason that major publishers such as EA and Blizzard have long since turned their backs on it. On top of that, people didn’t seem to connect with the Crossfire universe, and the game itself didn’t make much of an impression.
Instead, it disappeared into obscurity as a generic C&C or Starcraft clone and never made a splash.
Crossfire continues to struggle
So it seems that Crossfire will remain a Far Eastern phenomenon in the future. After all, Crossfire: Legion wasn’t the first failed attempt to gain a foothold in the West. A shooter called CrossfireX was also set to launch on consoles in 2022, with the Alan Wake developers from Remedy even being brought on board.
But here, too, the game failed to achieve great success. It was panned by critics and scored a measly 38 out of 100 points on Metacritic. Just one year after its release, Smilegate also threw in the towel here.
Crossfire was last seen in the West when the anthology series Secret Level was released on Amazon. One episode was also set in the Crossfire universe.
