Over the past year, we’ve been following the development of Scavengers, a multiplayer PvPvE survival shooter that entered early access last April. Gameplay involved pitting up to 20 teams of three against one another in a hostile environment, gathering the most datapoints, and exfiltrating. It’s also noted as one of the developing games that lauded Improbable’s SpatialOS technology, talking up how the platform changes gameplay and even demonstrating a chaotic match involving 9,000 players and bots in one map.
Unfortunately, Improbable’s angle towards creating a metaverse has seen Scavengers get cut away, as developer Midwinter Entertainment has been sold by Improbable to publisher Behaviour Interactive, resulting in the end of development of a console version and putting “a small internal team” to work on maintaining the shooter, effectively entering what reads like maintenance mode for an early access title; most of Midwinter has been put to work on a new Behaviour project.
“As part of our announced focus on the metaverse Improbable announced the divestment of its non metaverse focused content teams at the start of the year,” reads a statement from Improbable CEO Herman Narula. “We are really excited to have found partners who we believe can provide a fantastic home for the Midwinter team. […] The work done by the Midwinter team over the past three years has been phenomenal and we wish this team all the very best and will be looking forward to seeing their upcoming projects come to life.”
As for Scavengers itself, the game’s future isn’t elaborated upon by Improbable, Behaviour, or Midwinter, while the game’s last major update this past March added a new character, launched a new season, and made a variety of bug fixes. Players on Steam have thus far left “Mixed” reviews for the shooter, with many decrying a meager player head count and at least one person posting a pretty good apple pie recipe.
