The games industry has its fair share of flops. From games which simply never get the audience and interest their creators hoped for, through to games which totally miss the mark and fizzle out rapidly despite strong pre-launch hype and decent pre-order numbers, every year brings a number of launches -- even from very major publishers and studios -- that just don't pan out.

Much less common, though, to the point of being almost eyebrow-raising, is a game that launches to such universal disinterest that its publisher straight-up un-launches it -- shoving it right back into its box and telling everyone to move along, there's nothing to see here at all.

That's pretty much what happened to arena shooter Crucible this week, though, with the game -- which launched at the end of May -- being put back into closed beta. It's not being shut down entirely, and development will apparently continue on the title, but since new players can no longer sign up it will now only be accessible to the pretty small audience of existing players.

This would be a pretty embarrassing about-face for just about any games company. It's rendered far more so, however, by the fact that Crucible was meant to be the big-budget PC title that would announce the entry of one of the world's biggest technology companies, Amazon, to the core gaming market.

Needless to say, the utter lack of interest in Crucible is a terrible way for Amazon to make a start. The company seems to have miscalculated basically everything around this game; the title itself is boring and derivative in its current form, the launch has been botched, and as for what it thought it was doing in terms of marketing and building awareness for the game... Well, let's just say it's mind-boggling that this is the best a company worth a trillion dollars off the back of selling things could do.

Yet it's worth stepping back for a moment and taking note of the fact that, on paper, Crucible was a solid prospect in some ways. Relentless Studios, its creator, has a solid roster of development talent with good track records. The budget was decent and the Amazon Lumberyard engine it runs on is a fork of Crytek's CryEngine, which is generally well regarded. If you looked merely at the people developing it, the resources at their disposal, or even the technology they were using, there's nothing about Crucible that leaps out and screams "disaster." Nothing, perhaps, except the one thing that looms over the whole project -- Amazon itself.

Look, Amazon is a great company. It's not just an amazing retailer, it's also done an extraordinary job of making itself into a top-tier player in a host of other areas including content delivery and cloud services. I would not bet against Amazon being one of the world's dominant corporations for decades to come -- in fact, full disclosure, I have done the opposite of that, and own shares of Amazon. However, Amazon is not a games company, and while the existence of Amazon Game Studios and its investment in titles like Crucible suggests that it wishes to become a games company, there are some pretty huge red flags around that entire business strategy, many of which are waving frantically over what's just happened with Crucible.