The developers plan to make Critical Ops a game exclusively for mobile only and have shut down the PC platform completely on July 10, 2017.[1]
The announcement from the developers' Facebook [2]:
“ | ''Critical Ops will be exclusively a mobile game.
Our expertise as a company lies in creating mobile games and we are aiming for Critical Ops to be the top fps game in the mobile esports scene. To reach this goal, we need to concentrate all of our efforts into finishing the development of the main features of the game and work towards creating the greatest competitive experience on mobile. The PC version of the game takes huge amounts of extra time and resources with its problems unique to the platform while containing only a tiny fraction of the Critical Ops player base. This is why it is impossible for us to keep the PC version running or to develop it further with the level of quality we want to maintain. The change will happen step by step over the course of the upcoming weeks. One of these steps is disabling the cross platform option in the 0.8.0 update which will make PC players and mobile players unable to play with each other. After this we will also stop updating the PC version. We will also be disabling the in game purchases on the PC version. You will not be able to buy credits in Critical Ops on Gameroom starting from the 1st of June. The PC version will be shut down completely by the end of the summer 2017. If you want to save your account, you can do that by downloading Critical Ops from the Google Play store or the App Store, linking your account to Facebook and picking the account you used to play on PC with. Please note, that when you link an account and the game gives you an option pick from two possible accounts (PC account, and an account that has not been linked to Facebook), the other account will be deleted permanently. For this reason, be careful if you already have another account on your mobile device.'' | „ |
Here's the explanation on their Discord server:
“ | Yes unfortunately it’s true. On Monday the 10th of July 2017 we need to shut down the PC version in order for us to concentrate on the mobile version.
Originally when the company was founded the first game from the company was Critical Strike Portable of which the first version of was for the web browser. But many years ago the company founder Veli-Pekka was at GamesCom in Germany to showcase new game ideas and the game idea that got the best response was Critical Strike Portable for the mobile platform. There wasn’t much PC or console-like games on the mobile platform at that time – nor is there that many now either. It made total sense to target the platform with less competition. Thus the decision was made a long time ago that the company focus was going to be mobile from that point on. All this lead to Critical Ops being created much later on with mobile focus. We did keep the PC version of Critical Ops around at the beginning because it was convenient for testing purposes and in any case the deployments were at that time very similar to mobile deployments so it wasn’t that much of a hassle. But over time continuing to develop both the PC version and the mobile version became exceedingly arduous because the control scheme for the PC was so radically different and the whole feel of the game was so much different on the PC than for the mobile platforms. In addition to that during the last couple of years many browsers stopped supporting the Unity plugin that the PC version relied on. That meant we needed to go for Facebook Gameroom. Unfortunately there is not much players on the Facebook Gameroom platform. This also means that however the PC gamers that play the game are very vocal in the community there are way less PC gamers playing Critical Ops than there are mobile gamers. This is important to understand to see why we decided to cancel the PC version. To sum it up: Critical Ops for the PC was not that popular in the first place and it required massive resources to continue to develop. We just can’t afford to keep the PC version around. It was a hard decision. | „ |
The developers also say they cannot just leave PC as it is. Here's their explanation, as quoted in their Discord server FAQ:
“ | We can’t really do that. Critical Ops for the PC would become a bad experience very fast without constant care and attention. It would mean for example that it would run on bad servers resulting in high ping counts. Not to mention the PC version would get infested with hackers in no time. It would become almost unplayable, that wouldn’t look good for us as a company.
| „ |