The creators of The Culling: Origins have announced the end of their Battle Royale. This brings the third iteration of The Culling to a close. Both the first part and The Culling 2 had to be shut down.
When does The Culling end? The developer has announced that on May 15, 2019, the online services of The Culling: Origins will be shut down. Thus, the game is coming to an end almost exactly 9 months after its Free2Play launch.
According to the Director of Operations, Josh Van Veld, offline modes are still expected to be available. However, since The Culling is based on multiplayer as a BR shooter, the end of the online modes likely also means the end of the game.
That’s why The Culling is dying: The reason for shutting down the servers is that the game simply did not generate enough revenue.
When The Culling was relaunched as “Origins” in September 2018, it became free and featured an in-game shop. Van Veld stated (via PCGamer):
When we released the Origins update and made the game free2play, we hoped that the income from in-app purchases would be enough to cover the team and ongoing development. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
It wasn’t even due to a lack of players. Although many players played The Culling: Origins, it just didn’t generate enough:
Even with thousands of active users daily, the revenue was only a fraction of what the development team needed for their daily operations. As a result, we had to reduce the team size, which meant we could no longer ensure consistent support and updates.
Currently, some packs are still available for purchase on Steam. However, these and the in-game shop will be deactivated “as soon as possible.”
This is how The Culling developed: The Battle Royale The Culling has faced some heavy hurdles since its inception. Even two iterations before Origins did not make it:
- In March 2016, The Culling surprisingly launched in Early Access
- It enjoyed great popularity in the first months
- In December 2017, The Culling had to close down anyway. The success of PUBG was probably to blame
- In June 2018, The Culling 2 was already announced
- After just one week and a disastrous launch, The Culling 2 had to close down again
- In September 2018, the original version was relaunched as “Origins”
- Now, in May 2019, The Culling: Origins is also shutting down
Whether The Culling will make a fourth attempt remains to be seen. Currently, Van Veld is hinting that investors could get involved with Xaviant to save the servers of The Culling: Origins.
The battle royale market has recently been conquered by a new challenger:
