Kill confirmed: Ghost Recon Commander axed, developers laid off

The first social game ever launched by veteran game designers John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite's Loot Drop has been canceled. The latter sent out a tweet recently that confirmed that, unfortunately, Ubisoft and Loot Drop's Ghost Recon Commander will no longer be available come next year. As a result, Loot Drop was forced to let go of a number of developers.

"Sad news. Today, Ghost Recon Commander was canceled," Brathwaite tweeted. "As a result, we laid off a team of kick-ass developers. If you have openings, ping me." As of this writing, Ghost Recon Commander welcomes 20,000 daily players, according to AppData, whereas most successful hardcore social games have hundreds of thousands.

"Ghost Recon Commander will unfortunately be discontinued because the gameplay mechanics did not resonate with the core gamer audience," an Ubisoft representative told Pocket Gamer. Ubisoft added that "this decision does not reflect a change of strategy for any of Ubisoft's other social games currently in development or operation."

That was essentially our assessment when Ghost Recon Commander launched earlier this year, but there's no doubt that lots of hard work went into ensuring that the game was a success. Sadly, that simply didn't gel with Loot Drop's target audience. (Even the largest social game publisher, Zynga, is experiencing similar issues with 13 imminent closures incoming.) Ghost Recon Commander will remain playable until the end of this year with micro-transactions removed.

Are you bummed to see Ghost Recon Commander go? What did you think of the game in its prime? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.