Bad news for fans of The Culling: Developer Xaviant Games has announced that the game’s free-to-play servers will close officially on May 15th.
Readers will recall that The Culling was a proto battle royale survival sandbox that hit early access two years ago, but it didn’t make many headlines until 2018, when Xaviant released The Culling 2, a full battle royale title that that was met with such a hostile reception from Culling fans who felt abandoned that the studio canceled the sequel, released that depressing apology video, and went back to work on The Culling itself, restoring its launch content and going free-to-play.
But apparently it wasn’t enough. Though the studio says it doubled its total player count after free-to-play, Xaviant says in-app purchases weren’t sufficient to “sustain [that] team and support ongoing development.”
“The game’s servers have run continuously (with the stray outage here and there) for three years, but the time has come for us to announce that we will be taking The Culling offline on May 15th, 2019. While The Culling’s offline modes will remain available after that date, online play and associated features will not. To that end, the game’s store pages and in-app purchases will be disabled as soon as possible.”
“Even with thousands of active daily users, the revenue was only a fraction of what our dev team required to continue daily operations,” the studio says. “As a result, we’ve been forced to reduce our team size, which renders us unable to provide ongoing support and updates that would allow the game to grow and thrive.” Worth a note here: The studio says it’s open to handing over the reins to another team.
