Why Shroud’s Spectre Divide couldn’t compete with CS2 esports

Spectre Divide and its developers, Mountaintop Studios, announced it will be shutting down despite raising $30 million in funding last year.

Following dwindling numbers and lack of ‘funding to support the game,’ the community is left wondering what caused the downfall of Michael ‘Shroud‘ Grzesiek’s ‘Counter-Strike killer.’

Mountaintop CEO, Nate Mitchell, released a statement online, sharing that the tactical shooter would be shut down in the next 30 days — and Mountaintop Studios would be shuttered by the end of the week.

Mitchell said: “As time has gone on, we haven’t seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs of Spectre and the studio.

“We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition. In the end, we weren’t able to make it work.”

According to Steam DB charts, the game reached a peak of over 30,000 concurrent Steam players in the last six months. However, in the past month that peak has ranged from 700 to just over 1000, less than 5% of what it was back in September 2024.

This is in comparison to its main competitor, Counter-Strike 2, which regularly sees 1.3-1.8 million players in the past three months. In a genre dominated by giants, new FPS titles that aren’t already an established IP are finding difficulty breaking through.

Shroud announced he was working on Spectre Divide on August 1st, 2024. It offered what he called a ‘fresh unique style’ in a genre where ‘tactical shooters are all said and done.’

It was a 3v3 tactical first-person shooter, and featured the attack and defence bomb site format seen in VALORANT and Counter-Strike. The main highlight was the ‘Duality’ mechanic, where players could alternate between two different characters simultaneously.

There are multiple potential reasons for why the game failed to reach the heights it aspired to. In his statement, Mitchell said that ‘the industry is in a tough spot right now’ as more shooters are both releasing and shutting down.

On X, British YouTuber, Tomographic, said: “The team made a great game and injected something new into the genre for the first time in a long time. It’s a shame Spectre Divide couldn’t find its feet, but sending love and well wishes to the incredible talent this studio possesses.”

Others say that the game was doomed to fail from the start, with a mechanic that simply didn’t resonate with casual and esports players.

YouTuber Mischief said: “I don’t [want] to be that guy, but this game stood no chance because its sole gimmick was the most laughably idiotic idea imaginable.

“You can control two bodies and swap between them. That was the unique selling point of Spectre Divide. How this bad of an idea got funding is beyond me.”

On the other hand, Counter-Strike has an incredibly simple game premise that almost any player can pick up on after a couple of matches. Its simplicity has allowed it to continue standing as one of the most popular esports games in 2025.

Esports caster and analyst Ne0kai mocked the failure of Spectre Divide, which originally claimed that it would become the next big esport — maybe even taking over CS2’s spot. Many pointed out that Shroud never played his own game on stream and even made an esports team for a completely different game, clearly not confident in Spectre Divide’s success in the competitive scene.

A quick search online shows no tournaments for the game aside from a few small online events hosted by EGL — with very minimal signups. Content creators didn’t appear to get behind the competitive side, which is part of the issue. While some fans were hopeful in its first month that the game would have in-person events, that never came to be.

The game was enjoyed by some gamers in the FPS scene, but it was tough to compete with CS2, a game that has continued to maintain a massive esports and competitive fanbase.