The Culling: Origins, the free-to-play do-over of The Culling that went live in September 2018, will be closed in May. Developer Xaviant said in a farewell message  that it had hoped in-app purchased would generate enough revenue to support the battle royale game, but it hasn't worked out. 

Xaviant decided to make The Culling free to play after the release of The Culling 2 in July 2018 went disastrously wrong. Players were unhappy with the state of the game, which deviated dramatically from the original, and were also angry that Xaviant halted development of The Culling just a couple of months after it went into full release so it could work on the sequel. The backlash was so intense that the studio elected to pull the plug on The Culling 2 just a few weeks after releasing it and turn its attention back to the first game instead. 

"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," director of operations Josh Van Veld wrote. 

"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." 

The Culling servers will go offline on May 15. Offline modes will remain playable after that, but online play and related features will not—and since it's an online game, that's pretty much the end of it. The Steam store page, with options to purchase Starter and Founder Packs, is still up but will be taken down "as soon as possible," and in-app purchases will also be disabled. 

Van Veld offered a sliver of hope for die-hard fans that the game could continue to operate under the care and control of someone else by inviting other studios interested in "exploring the game's potential" to contact Xaviant about a takeover. "We think that with the proper resources and know-how in the free to play world, the right group could make great things happen," he wrote.   

It's not how Xaviant itself will be affected. I've reached out to the studio for more information and will update if I receive a reply. 

The Culling is going back to the beginning. With the battle royale’s sequel now officially shelved, developer Xaviant has returned to its predecessor; today it relaunches as The Culling: Origins. If you played the original back in its early access days, it might be familiar. 

“When The Culling originally launched in March of 2016, it had an exciting, ‘anything goes’ approach to battle royale that was eventually sanded down over the course of many updates,” says Xaviant. “Origins brings back that special mojo by returning to the game’s roots, incorporating the spirit of Day 1 combat, perks, airdrops and overall gameplay.”

It’s a dramatic shift that’s also been accompanied by the move to free-to-play. That’s not the only difference, however; Origins has a new art direction, XP, levelling, leaderboards, new weapons and voice chat. And since it’s going free-to-play, of course it’s going to have some crates. 

Cull Crates are awarded when you level up and contain four cosmetic items or in-game currency. Credits can also be used to buy more of these crates. Crates (and premium items) can also be purchased with tokens that cost real cash, though they will also appear in crates occasionally. It’s doesn’t sound like a terrible implementation, and only DLC will be completely unattainable without dropping money. The DLC also won’t be gameplay-related; all of that will be free-to-play.  

If you owned the original, you’ll receive an ‘Original Gangster’ founder pack. Inside you’ll get some outfits, 1000 tokens, weapon skins, two Culling Cards and four Cull Crates. The pack will also be available as DLC that will cost the same as the pre-F2P version of The Culling. 

The Culling: Origins is due out on Steam today. 

The release of The Culling 2 did not go well. The all-time player count, as recorded by Steam Charts, was 249, but it almost immediately plummeted to single digits, and currently holds an average concurrent player count of just 6. (Chris won his first round after the only other player in the match went AFK.) Faced with that, and a powerful backlash from the existing Culling fan base, developer Xaviant has announced a dramatic change of direction: The game will be shuttered and removed from sale, and refunds will be issued to everyone. 

"One thing that has emerged very clearly for us is that The Culling 2 was not a game that you asked for, and it's not the game that you expect as a worthy successor to The Culling," director of operations Josh Van Veld said. "So with that in mind, we've decided that the best course of action is to take that game down off of store shelves." 

What's even more interesting is that instead of trying to fix it, Xaviant is restarting work on the original game as The Culling: Day One, a reboot coming later this week that will make it exactly as it was when it debuted on Steam Early Access in 2016.

"That means all the perks are coming back, all the airdrops are coming back, combat goes back to its day one form. Literally every aspect of the gameplay will be what you remember," Van Veld said. "That's going to be our platform moving forward." 

To help bolster the player base, The Culling will also be made free to play when the Day One update goes live. Van Veld didn't get into exactly now that will work, but said that more information will be released later this week. 

It's a bold move, as they say, and unexpected, and the response in the comments on YouTube are almost entirely positive. Whether that translates into a viable game is another matter entirely, but full credit to Xaviant for going all-in on the course correction. It's also interesting to note that, while the numbers are tiny for both games, The Culling remains far more popular than its sequel: There are at this moment 35 people playing The Culling, while The Culling 2 hit its peak today with two. 

The Culling 2 was announced last week, just a few months after development of the original Culling had ended—which itself happened only a couple of months after the game had been fully released. That rapid-fire stop-and-go struck me as a bit odd, especially since the battle royale genre is more crowded than ever now. (Hello, Fortnite.) But Xaviant said that the timing isn't quite as "off" as it might appear, because the game had been in Early Access for so long. 

"On the PC, the vast bulk of our audience really only played during the first few months after we launched in Early Access in March of 2016. We did dozens of patches and content updates after that, but we never saw our sales or player numbers return after the initial boom died down. To be honest, apart from a passionate core audience, the majority of PC players haven’t seen or thought about The Culling in two years," director of operations Josh Van Veld told me in an email. "That’s a healthy timeline for a sequel to roll around." 

The Early Access release created other challenges for the studio as well. "Before the game is shown to the public, a developer is free to recklessly experiment, introduce bugs, and generally make a lot of mistakes. Once people have paid you for a game, it now belongs to them," Van Veld continued. "It’s a big responsibility and in retrospect I think we initially failed to appreciate how big changes could be disruptive for a live game, Early Access or not." 

Because of that experience, Xaviant will not be releasing The Culling 2 as an Early Access game. "In theory, Early Access is a roadmap to a full release. In practical terms, every game launches once," Van Veld said. "If you make people aware of your game and offer it for sale, you’ve launched. Whatever label you apply doesn’t change that." 

The situation is somewhat different for owners of the Xbox One version, which came out much later than expected and thus came out of Game Preview much more quickly. Because of that, Van Veld said, Xbox players didn't see the game evolve: Instead, their first access came in June 2017, and the timeline leading to the announcement of the sequel is much shorter.

"We completely understand how that may appear unorthodox, because much of indie development is unorthodox, but it’s certainly not nefarious," he said.   

Van Veld also addressed a recent leak of The Culling 2, although he described it more pointedly as a "theft" and "a deliberate attack on our studio intended to disrupt an official announcement of our new game." Gameplay from a work-in-progress build was shared with a small segment of The Culling community, and not everyone reacted well to the changes they saw. A thread in The Culling subreddit, for instance, criticizes the gameplay for looking like "a generic third-person shooter," too similar to games like H1Z1 and PUBG.

"The direction we chose to take with The Culling 2 is to embrace what the genre has evolved into over the last couple of years, while preserving the core and spirit of The Culling. First and foremost is melee combat," he said. "While The Culling 2 now features a full suite of ballistically-accurate firearms, our robust melee combat system remains intact and is more deadly than ever. Combined with specific Perks (another system we’re bringing back from the original game) and a more intimate Battle Royale setting, it is possible to build yourself as a fast, silent assassin capable of taking out gun-toting opponents," 

Van Veld wasn't willing to share more about the game, but he did express a few thoughts about the leak itself. The people involved "claim to be passionate fans of The Culling, yet have been on a long-standing crusade to bully and harass members of our team, even to the point of harassing a team member’s spouse," he said. "These toxic individuals use complaints about our game as a smokescreen to justify their behavior. It’s offensive, gross and frankly unacceptable." 

"I know that a leak is seen as a normal thing that happens, especially to AAA titles, but like many indie studios we’re a small group with a lot riding on this and each game we put out. We’re real people with spouses, children, families and lives. Any kind of attack on Xaviant feels like an attack on us personally, not on some vague corporate entity. In addition, this type of harassment can and often does bleed into the personal realm, affecting members of our development team directly and indirectly." 

The Culling 2 doesn't have a release date but Van Veld said Xaviant is "excited to get the game into the hands of players soon." 

Developer Xaviant pulled the plug on the battle royale game The Culling in December 2017, just a couple of months after taking it from Early Access to full release. Today, the studio revealed that a sequel, The Culling 2, is now in development. 

There are no details yet beyond the tweet and the fact that the account is now called The Culling 2, but it's a surprising move for Xaviant to make. The average concurrent player count of The Culling when development was ended was 14, and it hadn't been above double digits since May 2017. And it's not as though the battle royale genre has become less crowded and competitive since then: The Culling's player count started tanking right around the time we described Fortnite as "a fun but bloated base defense shooter," and we all know what's happened since then.

(And if you don't know, the short version is that Fortnite is a juggernaut and there are plenty of other smaller-but-good BR games to choose from too.)

I also wonder if the quickness with which Xaviant hit the brakes on The Culling (and to be clear, the servers are still up, so it's not dead, just abandoned) will work against it, particularly with work on a sequel beginning so soon after. If nothing else, it doesn't strike me as a good look.

I've reached out to Xaviant to ask about its plans for the new game and will update if I receive a reply. Either way, I expect we'll be hearing more about The Culling 2 very soon.

It's been well over a year since we last looked at the small-scale battle royale game The Culling. It was "sloppy but fun," we said in our March 2016 analysis, "and it's easy to see why it instantly became a Steam top seller and a popular show on Twitch." But the battle royale scene now is a lot different than it was then: The Culling has been utterly eclipsed by PUBG, and just a couple of months after it finally came out of Early Access the developers at Xaviant are moving on to other things. 

"This past October, we brought The Culling out of Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview. Battle royale, the genre we helped to pioneer, is now a favorite of millions and we can’t help but feel a sense of pride for having been part of its birth," director of operations Josh Van Veld wrote in the "Final Island Diary." 

"After more than two years dedicated to making The Culling, it’s time to announce that Xaviant has begun work on a new title. Despite having grown our then tiny team into a slightly larger group of twenty developers, this means that our entire focus is now on our new project. There are no future updates planned for The Culling." 

The good news is that the servers will remain online "for the foreseeable future," so those 15 of you who are currently playing will be able to continue to do so. (Seriously, it's 15.) But that doesn't seem like a state of affairs that can be maintained for very long, especially since The Culling hasn't had a triple-digit peak concurrent player count since May.   

"While we’re excited to be working on something new, it’s also bittersweet to be moving on," Van Veld wrote. "No matter who you are or how much you participated in the game’s development over the last couple of years, I want to offer a sincere thank you on behalf of myself and the Xaviant team for being part of something special. We know we couldn’t have done it without you and we are eternally grateful." 

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may have popularised the genre inspired by the Japanese movie, but it’s not the only battle royale game pitting players against each other in desperate fights to the death. Below are 11 games, modes and mods that you should check out if you can’t get enough of hunting your fellow man.

GAMES

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

Let’s get the current top dog out of the way first, shall we? PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, is still in Early Access, but it’s already swallowed up the lives of millions of players. In each match, 100 survivors are air dropped into a bucolic Russian island, seemingly abandoned during or just after the Soviet era. It’s a huge place, but the play area is always shrinking, forcing players to race towards safety on foot or using cars, bikes and boats, all while trying to murder each other with a wide range of guns and melee weapons. It’s a game filled with long moments of quiet tension, punctuated by chaotic, nerve-racking battles.

H1Z1: King of the Kill

Another Early Access game, H1Z1: King of the Kill was spun out of Daybreak’s zombie survival game. The survival aspect became its own separate game, Just Survive, while the more competitive, PvP side of things became King of the Kill. Frenetic and fast-paced, it’s more of an arena shooter than a game like PUBG, so you won’t have to wait long to get into a gunfight. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene was also a consultant on H1Z1 before making Battlegrounds.

Ark: Survival of the Fittest

Like H1Z1, Ark: Survival of the Fittest is another arena-style battle royale game, and is similarly a spin-off. Its hook, not surprisingly given its progenitor, is that there are dinosaurs and monsters to watch out for, as well as 71 human adversaries potentially hunting you down. Other elements from Survival Evolved have made it in, too, including riding and taming creatures, tribes and traps. Unfortunately, it’s struggled to retain its playerbase in the face of PUBG.

The Culling

If you prefer battle royales of the more intimate variety, there’s The Culling and its 8-player and 16-player blood-soaked arenas. Though it’s fast-paced, there’s still time to craft equipment and set traps. The central conceit is a big draw, too, set as the game is in a crazed game show for sadists. It’s been in Early Access since March 2016, and while it was popular initially, it looks like player numbers might be on the wane.

Last Man Standing

Budget PUBG is probably the clearest way to describe Last Man Standing. It’s set on an island with 100 players trying to kill each other, the play area is a big circle that shrinks over time, mods can be scavenged and attached to guns, it’s got loot crates—there’s a long list of similarities, but Last Man Standing is free. It’s not quite as polished as its premium counterpart, however.

GAME MODES

GTA Online, Motor Wars

GTA Online recently got a competitive mode called Motor Wars, which has some similarities to popular battle royale games: a shrinking kill box, arriving from the sky, then finding the best weapons possible on the ground. The key difference is that it's more focused around vehicle combat, and all the cars are marked on the map, as well as the players driving them. The shrinking kill space provides a similar amount of tension, though, and there's tons more potential in building on the idea, given the size of the map they've got to play with. Sam had fun with it, even though it has some flaws.

Fortnite

Epic has announced a new battle royale mode for their base-building romp, Fortnite. It’s due out this month and will see up to 100 players duking it out until there’s only one left. The mode was put together by Epic’s Unreal Tournament team, who were busy experimenting while Fortnite was in development. The scavenging and building from the game’s regular mode will also feature in this new one, so you’ll be able to create bases and fortifications to hole up in while you wait for everyone else to die. They’ll probably be doing the same, mind you.

Unturned

Unturned is a blocky, free-to-play zombie survival game, but it’s also got a battle royale arena mode. Players are spawned at random points on the map and must hunt each other down while a barrier closes in, damaging those outside it. It’s as straightforward as a battle royale can be, but there’s one odd wrinkle: you can’t damage people with your fists, so you’d better get a weapon as quickly as you can.

MODS

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale in Arma 2, Arma 3

Before PUBG, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene created DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of the original DayZ mod for Arma 2, inspired by the Japanese film. When players started leaving DayZ for the standalone Early Access version, Greene switched to developing Battle Royale in Arma 3. Later, it was licensed to Daybreak for H1Z1 and became the foundation for King of the Kill. A lot of Battlegrounds’ features started in PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, and Arma 3’s realistic aesthetic isn’t far of PUBG’s.

Rust: Battle Royale

Rust: Battle Royale is an unofficial mode for Facepunch Studio’s survival game, made by Intoxicated Gaming. Inspired by the Arma 3 Battle Royale mod, it combines the brutality of Rust—you even begin naked—with the race to be the final person left alive. All the survival and crafting elements have been torn out, with the focus being entirely on gearing up and murdering your fellow players in a map that becomes smaller and smaller as bombs start to fall.

Garry's Mod Battle Royale

Created last year, this Garry’s Mod game mode, like so many in this list, owes its creation to the Arma 3 mod, being a lightweight recreation of it designed by IC4RO so they could play it with their friends. Since then, however, it’s become popular, no doubt helped by the fact that Garry’s Mod is considerably cheaper than Arma 3 or Battlegrounds. 

When Chris got to grips with Xaviant's Early Access-dwelling first-person shooter-cum-slasher The Culling last year, he described it as "sloppy but fun"—noting that while the action was often tense and relentless, there were also stretches of quiet as players were killed off and battles thinned out. The game's latest update—named The Big House—looks to flesh out some of these issues by virtue of a new map, more ways to play, and "tons of other changes". 

The Cul County Correctional facility marks The Culling's new zone—a prison yard arena filled with multi-levelled plains, vantage points and hidey-holes; while new weapons take the form of Yaris, Pitchforks, Pikes, Steel Punji Sticks, Steel Caltrops, and Survival Axes. New events include the Golden Crowbar, Shake & Bake, Drop Your Bridges, and a Lightning Round - which includes solo and team-play. Full details on the minutiae of all of that can be found this way. 

And here's some of it motion: 

The Big House update brings with it an extensive list of changes, adjustments and bug fixes to The Culling and, although still living in Early Access, marks its shift from alpha phase to beta. A player XP system is also now in place, so too is player levelling. 

"Although we’ve addressed many known issues, this build is not an exit from Early Access. Instead, it represents our transition from Alpha to Beta. This is an exciting milestone that ushers in a new era of The Culling," says the developer in an update post. "At the same time, it doesn’t mean we’re quite out of the woods, or the tropical island—see what we did there?—just yet. There’s still plenty of bug fixing, optimizing, and polishing to do."

As a result of the update, The Culling's servers will be down today, Wednesday 18, from 8am ET/1pm GMT for up to four hours.

I spent some time with Early Access FPS The Culling, which takes sixteen players and drops them in an arena where they scrouge for crafting supplies, craft and find weapons, and whomp each other to death as a dome of poison gas slowly closes around them. It's a standalone battle royale game, in other words, and a fun and promising one at that.

You begin with a fairly limited character creation screen, select some perks that increase your damage with bladed weapons, allow you to slowly heal from injuries, and so on, and choose what types of weapons you'd like to find in your airdrops. Then you're unleashed in the outdoor arena that contains hills, trees, and a few buildings. As the 25 minute timer runs down, players begin killing each other while scavenging for crafting supplies, healing items, and weapons. They also gather F.U.N.C., a currency earned by killing players or scavenging, which can be spent on health dispensing machines or to unlock crates, or to call in your supply drops.

Dubious as I was about crafting in a Last Man Standing game, I think The Culling does a good job with it. It's relatively simple: pick up a rock and use it with another rock, and you'll have a stone dagger. Throw in a stick and you can make an axe. Keep adding to it and you'll soon have a spear or a bow. Need a bandage? Shave some bark off a tree. Holding one resource while targeting another will tell you what the resulting item will be, making it easy to learn what goes with what.

The added touch here is that the crafting feels good. Rather than just hearing some vague crafting sounds and watching a timer, you can actually see the sticks or stones in your hands as you struggle to shape them into a weapon or item. Crafting the same things in match after match has the potential to becoming boring quickly, so at least they've done a bit to spice it up.

I'm hoping the melee combat will be goosed to be a bit more satisfying. It's fun and frantic, but it's currently kinda messy. You can shove opponents to knock them off balance and stagger them with a good block, but the hacking and slashing is sloppy and the feedback when you land a blow or get struck isn't great. Hopefully it'll be tightened up while it's in Early Access.

You can throw weapons as well, like spears, axes, and grenades. The only ranged weapon I used was my crafted bow, which felt good—plus I got to see my opponent's body fill up with my arrows before I ran out of ammo. (I even threw my bow at him, though that was an accident.) You start with room for only three weapons or items, but if you find a backpack you can add an additional two slots.

You can also build traps, like punji-stick snares, though I never managed to trap anyone, mainly because there are only sixteen players and their numbers get quickly whittled down. Poison gas traps scattered around can also be activated, and late-game supply crates may explode rather than give you weapons, adding in a little gamble to the proceedings.

There's an energetic V.O. host making various announcements about who has just been killed and how, and informing everyone when airdrops are inbound. He also voices the healing machines. ("Have you been injured in your toilet area?") After a few rounds you'll start hearing the same quotes repeated, but I still enjoy the commentator's relentlessly peppy attitude. There also a few smart design decisions. Want to check out the leaderboard to see how you're doing and who's left? Just look up: it's projected on the side of the dome so you don't need to toggle a menu.

As tense and relentless as the action can feel at times, there are also great stretches of quiet moments. After a handfuls of players have met the nasty end of a spear or been pummeled to death with bare fists in the opening minutes, the remaining gladiators can take quite a while to come in contact with each other. I spent a lot of time in my best match (I placed 3rd) simply scavenging, swapping out crude weapons for finer ones, and lurking near health dispensers hoping to hear someone stumble into my snares.

Unfortunately for me, another player spent his time finding a gun, presumably from an airdrop. Gun beats bow, obviously. Though I lost the match, I still unlocked a random cosmetic item for doing well overall.

In its current state The Culling is fun and fairly inexpensive ($15/ 10 on Steam), and it's easy to see why it instantly became a Steam top seller and a popular show on Twitch. The melee definitely needs some tightening, and I think the rounds are perhaps a bit too long at 25 minutes. You need time, obviously, to scrounge and craft, but the final 10 minutes of the matches I played (and then spectated after death) were a little long as the remaining players took their sweet time meeting in the middle of the arena for the final showdown.

The Culling, announced last week, is a little bit Rust and a little bit Running Man: 16 players crammed into a tropical island paradise with nothing but crafting resources and 20 minutes to kill each other dead. It's being developed by Xaviant, the studio behind Lichdom: Battlemage, and it sounds like good, murderous fun, even though it's still very early in the development process. Which brings me to the point. A closed alpha is coming, and you may now sign up to take part.

Launching a Closed Alpha will allow the community to have an active role in The Culling s development. Xaviant founder and CEO Michael McMain said. The feedback gathered from the test will ensure that we are able to deliver the reliable and balanced experienced our players deserve.

The difference between a closed alpha and a closed beta is a bit hazy but I think has to do primarily with lower expectations, which is to say that a beta will run reasonably well in most cases, while an alpha is more or less a success as long as it doesn't set your PC on fire. 

In this particular case, Xaviant is looking for help stress-testing our server infrastructure and identifying other issues we may have missed prior to the Early Access launch on Steam. The studio clarified that taking part in the alpha will not entitle you to a copy of the Early Access release, and asked that everyone please ensure they meet the minimum system requirements before signing up. Fortunately, they are fairly undemanding:

• OS: 64-Bit OS Required: Win7 SP1, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10
• Processor: Intel Core i3 560 / AMD Phenom2 X4 945
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: DX11 GPU with 1GB VRAM: NVidia GTX 460/ AMD Radeon 5850
• DirectX: Version 11
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 8 GB available space

The Culling will go live on Early Access on March 8 and sell for $15/ 15, which doesn't really seem fair, with a ten percent discount offered from March 8-14.

Update: Xaviant has issued a statement explaining why the price for The Culling is the same in both dollars and pounds, which results in UK customers paying a premium of more than 25 percent. Our Euro and GBP pricing follows the Steam store s standard recommended conversions, which account for the value-added tax levied in those countries," Producer Josh Van Veld said. "We feel that The Culling is a bargain at those prices and we hope fans worldwide will agree.