The video games business is not the easiest to get into, even if it can potentially make you loads of cash.

It’s probably that aspect that lured corporate titan Amazon into the ring, but, as Bezos’ outfit is finding out quite quickly, building out a compelling battle royale game is a little bit tougher than making sure packages arrive on time, among other things.

Still, we have to give them credit. Crucible is solid, it not overwhelmingly good, and the company’s decision to take it back into beta to figure out how to make it better only bodes well for its future – at least that’s what we hope.

You see, there’s nothing more tragic than a load of cash being poured into a decent game that no one cares about. It’s like a kind of first-world tragedy that makes people say things like “well that money could have been better spent elsewhere.”

Yet Crucible may yet rise to the heights of the gaming industry. At least that’s the hope.

Colin Johanson, who helms Crucible’s devs, said of the return to beta, “We’ll continue following the roadmap we laid out previously and working on map, combat, and system changes to improve the Heart of the Hives experience as well as implementing other improvements based on your feedback and what we think the game needs in order to thrive.”

And, lest we forget, Fortnite wasn’t released on day one as a battle royale game. The “Save the World” mode was supposed to be the marquee presence out in the wild for the game, but that didn’t quite catch on with audiences. In fact, many critics at the time thought that Fortnite was going to be an expensive mess of a game that took nearly 10 years to come out. Not to mention that the “multiplayer mode” that was included with the game was overflowing with microtransactions – then the bane of any gamer’s existence.

Look at where we are now, though. Fortnite has not only overcome a weak core game to explode into popularity but has enabled Epic to pursue growth opportunities and strategies that were not previously available to it. In other words, Fortnite is printing the money that Epic is using to wage its campaign to become bigger, better, and more dominant in the industry than it could ever have imagined previously. That’s no guarantee that everything will work out.

But you know that Jeff Bezos has to be watching that phenomenon with keen interest. What better way to launch the Amazon Games Store than something like the company’s own Fortnite.

Whether Crucible is it or not, we know that Amazon is unlikely to give up. That should make for an interesting future. 

Have you had a chance to play Crucible yet? What do you think of it? What about the game’s return to beta status? Should this be a new trend in the industry for big-budget games that fail to capture their audience on the first go-around? Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments section below.

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