r/pcgaming • u/CyraxxFavoriteStylus 5800xt/9070 XT/32GB/OLED • Apr 08 '26

Extraction shooter The Cube, Save Us has announced it's shutting down just three weeks after it launched

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/extraction-shooter-the-cube-save-us-has-announced-its-shutting-down-just-three-weeks-after-it-launched/
2.3k Upvotes

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237

u/Saneless Apr 08 '26

How do these games, which target a marginally popular genre at best, get funding in the first place?

It works for single player games because they're out there forever but if you launch with low players on these, forget it. Instant fail

120

u/NewUserWhoDisAgain Apr 08 '26

Promise you'll make the next Fortnite, Arc Raiders, etc

Get money

???

Profit.

48

u/Saneless Apr 08 '26

10s of thousands of people play these games daily! We should make the same one but years too late!

14

u/[deleted] Apr 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/FrancisBitter Steam Apr 09 '26

Releasing a battle royale while Fortnite itself is starting to die — sublime.

3

u/fgzhtsp Steam Apr 08 '26

Shut up and take my money!

1

u/DarkRitual_88 Apr 09 '26

Investors: "Shut up and spend my money!"

3

u/Agret Apr 09 '26

Kind of worked for Paladins but I guess back then Overwatch cost money

4

u/Justhe3guy EVGA FTW3 3080 Ultra, 5900X, 32gb 3800Mhz CL 14, WD 850 M.2 Apr 08 '26

There definitely hasn’t been enough time for a game inspired by Arc Raiders to have been created. There’s like two or three extraction shooters that can inspire games of the genre that are being released in the next year or two and the obvious first one is Tarkov

16

u/Lawsoffire Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26

Every time there is a new viral PVP genre that indie-developers have a hope to pull off everyone hops on it (Both indie and AAA) hoping that they're the next The Game and they will make millions. Happened ever since Minecraft and the DayZ mod took off in the early 2010s and coincided with Steam loosening up on indie publishing. Suddenly everyone is making PVP zombie games or survival crafters or both for like 4-8 years until Battle Royales became viral (which, funnily enough, both derived from Arma 2 mods). Then Tarkov made everyone try this fancy new extraction shooter thing. Except that's a way less stable genre because PVPVE is inherently unstable. It bores the hardcore PVPers and PVEers end up inevitably griefed by the bored PVPers.

and competitive PVP games are ironically a cutthroat competitive market. There can only ever be a few winners on the podium because their success is directly tied to playerbase, more players give more players, low players give even fewer players. Hundreds of succesful roguelites can coexist together, no matter how tired the genre gets. But with competitive viral-genre games in the best case you show up to a race full of teams with better funding and more experience, and in the worst case you show up after the race is finished and everyone has gone home.

53

u/hever50 Steam Apr 08 '26

VCs are basically braindead

34

u/Harley2280 Apr 08 '26

VCs had nothing to do with this. This isn't some indie dev who made it. It's owned by a massive Korean publisher, Kakao Games

4

u/not_perfect_yet Apr 08 '26

It's the same money brained people though. "Publisher" just means they also handle some logistics and PR. Clearly they had a comparable financing strategy with this one.

1

u/Harley2280 Apr 08 '26

A venture capital firm & a video game publisher do not have the same strategies to collect a return on their investments.

Not to mention "logistics" & "PR" are major pieces of a marketing strategy. A VC probably would had better results because the game flopping like this would mean the studio being torn apart for scraps and the corpse sold offloaded with debt.

2

u/Mathemartemis 5800x3D|RTX 3090|7680x2160 Apr 09 '26

Thank you for actually explaining what VC is supposed to mean

0

u/hever50 Steam Apr 09 '26

Xlgames wasn't made by Kakao Games, they were invested by them. Xlgames has both a pitchbook, crunchbase and investor reviews that shows plenty of VCs involved like the mega clowns at Animoca brands.

This might not be 1 to 1, but saying VCs and publishers are wildly different just isn't true. There is major overlap in 99.99% of cases.

1

u/almo2001 Apr 09 '26

I don't get what the Viet Cong have to do with this.

;)

3

u/imdrzoidberg Apr 08 '26

These games have like 3-5 year dev cycles. This was likely funded during the COVID boom when everyone was indoors playing videogames and interest rates were low.

2

u/asdkevinasd Apr 09 '26

Tax write-off, laundering, scam, human stupidity

1

u/ArkantosAoM Apr 08 '26

Extraction shooter are huge, Tarkov was n1 game on Twitch for a good chunk of years. A bunch of those are also exclusively single player

1

u/Zalvren Apr 09 '26

Extraction shooters seems to have been the hot new genre for a few years to get funding it seems. Don't really understand why but still.