Crucible has entered closed beta, which is unusual since it was already released on Steam on May 20. Reviews of the free-to-play shooter put it at 48%.

Crucible will be available on Steam until July 1 at 9 a.m. PST, after which the release will be lifted and closed to new players. Eventually, players will be able to sign up for the beta on the official website.

While returning to closed beta, Relentless Studios (part of Amazon Game Studios) will stay true to the existing development roadmap, which can be seen on Trello, while also taking "beta players" (regular players until this week) stated that feedback will be taken into consideration.

"The Crucible player experience will remain largely unchanged during the beta. One of the biggest changes is that we, the developers, will have a dedicated time each week to play with the community and solicit feedback." The game will be accessible 24/7 so you can continue to voluntarily set up matches with other players."

We encourage you to join our Discord server to find players to play against.

The reason we need organization to get into a crucible match is the same reason we are going back to closed beta: not enough people are playing. At the time of this writing, Steam Charts shows 146 simultaneous players for Crucible. That's a miserable number of players for a new free-to-play multiplayer game.

The only other recent game that has been hit as hard as Crucible is Artifact, which Valve continued to recalibrate and returned to beta earlier this year. Nevertheless, it is unusual for a game released without qualification to return to the testing phase. Aside from Crucible and Artifact, I can think of only two or three other major examples. The Arkham Knight disaster comes to mind, but that game was not free-to-play.

While Crucible returns to beta, Johanson says Relentless Studios will work with a "community council." The "community council" will include "competitive" players as well as casual players. At this point, it is unlikely that there are competitive crucible players, but if you like the game and want to see improvements, joining the council may be your chance to make an impact.

Not releasing the game is unconventional, but if Relentless wanted to have a chance to turn Crucible around, they had to do something big. And while an independent studio might have run out of money and had to close up store, Relentless has the financial backing of a company that could acquire several countries if it wanted to. Let's see if this studio lives up to its name.