Shroud-backed Spectre Divide ‘isn’t going anywhere’ despite Mountaintop Studios layoffs

Spectre Divide came onto the gaming scene hot, with a legitimately interesting twist on the tactical shooter genre and an advisory role for former CS:GO pro/FPS streaming god shroud. Unfortunately, it couldn’t maintain that momentum, and its player count quickly dwindled.

After debuting to a peak of 26,000 players on Steam according to Steam Charts, Spectre Divide is now hovering between 2,000 and 3,000 peak concurrent players on a daily basis. That’s definitely better than, say, Concord, but it also isn’t setting the world on fire, and Mountaintop Studios has even laid off a few devs since the game’s launch. Despite these concerns, Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell posted a blog today clearing up rumors and concerns for those still playing the game, promising a full new update of fresh content in season one—schedules for launch in December 2024 or January 2025—while the developers collect feedback in their current “save round,” as Mitchell puts it.

“Some folks out there have declared Spectre ‘dead,’ mostly as a result of low concurrency,” Mitchell said to begin the blog. “It’s true that Spectre’s concurrent player count is lower than we’d all like… I can assure you that Spectre isn’t going anywhere.” Mitchell further detailed how the company laid off some developers, taking the Spectre Divide team from “more than 85” to “about 75 full-time devs.”

Currently, the plan for the team is to collect feedback and make behind-the-scenes changes to improve the base game experience for everyone playing. After that, it seems like Mountaintop plans to ship a battle pass, ranked rewards, a new Sponsor, and more when season one launches.

And while a battle pass and new content generally means more items coming to the shop, Mountaintop is slowing down the pace of new items coming to the game’s store. Probably a wise decision, considering the early review bombing over skin prices at launch.

Mitchell also further explained shroud’s role with the game and what he’s doing with the Mountaintop team moving forward. While it seemed during Spectre Divide‘s launch that shroud was enjoying playing Deadlock far more than his own game, Mitchell described him as “an incredible advisor” and said he’s continued to work with the team on future content and “making Spectre as compelling as possible for both community members and streamers.”

Low player count numbers are worrying, and layoffs are always a bad sign for a studio before you even mention the human toll it takes on the devs affected. But at the very least, Spectre Divide players don’t need to be worrying about the servers being turned off anytime soon.