The Culling to Shut Down Their Online Servers

Unfortunate news has fallen upon The Culling, the popular Battle Royale game from 2016. The servers are shutting down.

Josh Van Veld, the Director of Operations at game developer Xaviant, recently posted an announcement in the game's dedicated blog. In it, he announces that The Culling's online servers will be closing down on May 15, 2019. After that, online functionality will no longer be available, though offline modes will be. In turn, in-app purchases and the game's store pages will be disabled "as soon as possible."

"When we launched the Origins update and made the game free to play, our hope was that the revenue generated from in-app purchases would be enough to sustain our team and support ongoing development, but unfortunately that was not the case.

Even with thousands of active daily users, the revenue was only a fraction of what our dev team required to continue daily operations. As a result, weve 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."

Van Veld also stated that if there was a studio or team that was interested in taking over the development and maintenance of The Culling should contact them at info@xaviant.com

The Culling went through an interesting ordeal over its life span. Originally releasing in March of 2016, the game had over three million players at one point. The studio then released The Culling 2 in 2017, which was strongly criticized for its rushed development and shallow gameplay depth. To try and recoup community interest, the first Culling game went free-to-play last November on Xbox One.

"While its sad for us to say goodbye, we want to offer a sincere and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has enjoyed the game, contributed feedback, and spent their hard-earned money to support our efforts over the years. The Culling has always been a labor of love, a learning experience, and an opportunity to pursue our passion for making games."