If you are one of the 32 players currently still playing The Culling on PC, you may be sad to hear that the game's servers will be shutting down on May 15. Of course, this also means that the servers for the Xbox One version are going away and I'm guessing that there are maybe a few more players on that platform? Who knows anymore. The game is pretty dead either way.
In case you forgot, Xaviant had gone back to The Culling after developing, releasing, and then pulling The Culling 2 after being on sale for just 8 days from July 10-18, 2018. Xaviant had returned back to the original game and making it a free-to-play title.
The devs at Xaviant put up notice of the closure of the servers earlier today. You can read the entirety of their farewell notice below.
Greetings Contestants!
The Culling has had a wild ride. Since the game’s original launch in March of 2016, more than 3 million of you have tested your resolve on the island, with nearly half that number joining the fray since The Culling: Origins became free to play on Xbox One last November.
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.
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, 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.
If there is a team out there who is interested in taking the reins from us and exploring the game’s potential, please contact us at info@xaviant.com. We think that with the proper resources and know-how in the free to play world, the right group could make great things happen.
While it’s 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.
Josh Van Veld
Director of Operations
Xaviant
The Culling has had a wild ride. Since the game’s original launch in March of 2016, more than 3 million of you have tested your resolve on the island, with nearly half that number joining the fray since The Culling: Origins became free to play on Xbox One last November.
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.
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, 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.
If there is a team out there who is interested in taking the reins from us and exploring the game’s potential, please contact us at info@xaviant.com. We think that with the proper resources and know-how in the free to play world, the right group could make great things happen.
While it’s 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.
Josh Van Veld
Director of Operations
Xaviant
