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. 

It turns out the Battle Royale genre isn’t the bottomless goldmine that Fortnite and PUBG would suggest. First Radical Heights failed to save Cliff Blezinski’s Boss Key Productions from shuttering. Now The Culling 2 has performed badly enough that the developer is doing some soul searching.

The Culling 2 released on Tuesday, with Xaviant having halted development of the original Culling to produce the sequel. This decision hasn’t gone down well with its player base. The Culling 2 currently sports a rarely glimpsed “Very Negative rating on Steam, having received a slew of scathing reviews (13% positive at time of writing). “This is NOT the Culling”, says user Kaffe “It is more a bad rip-off of PUBG and H1Z1”. Steam user Fairlight was even less complimentary, stating “I stubbed my toe on the way to install this game. It was the most enjoyable part of the experience.”

Specifically, players lament the allegedly ropey state of the game at launch, along with some fundamental changes in the sequel’s mechanics, which places less emphasis on melee combat and use of traps and focusses on gunplay much like Fortnite and PUBG. General community anger is contributing to the wave of negativity too. The original game is also seeing its Steam rating drop, with recent reviews categorised as mostly negative. 

The Culling 2’s user base has fallen off a cliff, too. Not that it was a very high cliff to begin with. According to Steam Charts, while the first game peaked at 12,622 concurrent users, The Culling 2’s all-time peak was just 249 players. At the time of writing, one person was playing the game about an hour ago. 

I can’t help but be fascinated by this individual. Who is this dogged lone wolf, playing a Battle Royale game all by themselves? What drives them forward? Curiosity? Determination? Madness? Moreover, what happens to the game in this scenario? Do you automatically win and escape the area? Or are you simply forced to wait until whatever play-area shrinking gimmick crushes you into oblivion?

Joking aside, The Culling 2’s struggles have prompted a response from Xaviant. Yesterday, the developer tweeted “It’s time for us here at Xaviant to come together for some much-needed soul searching and to have some admittedly difficult discussions about the future of our studio.” It ended simply with “We’ll talk soon.”

Battle royale game The Culling 2 has arrived on Steam, just six months after work on developer Xaviant's original BR game, The Culling, was halted. Today, I jumped into my first match of the Culling 2 and hung around the in-game lobby, waiting for other players to join. A few minutes later, the match began, and roughly 15 seconds after that I was declared the winner. It happened so quickly my parachute hadn't even opened yet. You can watch the entire 'match' above or here on YouTube. Audio is helpful so you can hear the announcer excitedly crown me the victor as I'm still in freefall.

Before you hoist me upon your shoulders as a true master of all things battle royale, it's perhaps worth nothing that there was only one other player in the match, and as you can see from the lobby footage in the video, he may have been AFK. As it's rare that I ever win anything, let alone a battle royale game, I'm still going to wear my badge of victory proudly. It's like Thunderdome: two men enter, one man falls asleep or wanders off for a snack or alt-tabs out to stare glassily at Twitter, one man leaves.

Following my remarkable two-player battle royale win, I did get into some more crowded rounds of The Culling 2 (I lost all of them), and I'll have a few thoughts about what the game is like (when other people are playing it) soon.

The announcement of The Culling 2 last month came as something of a surprise, given that it had only been six months since development of the original game had been halted. Developer Xaviant responded to questions about the timing and the fate of the first game a couple of days later, and said that the new game would be released "very soon." Today it clarified that by "very soon," it meant July 10, which is tomorrow. 

The Culling 2 will feature a larger arena than its predecessor and will put a much greater emphasis on firearms, although the melee system from the first game remains. Matches will support up to 50 players, which will encourage "fast and brutal" gameplay, Xaviant said, "while still accommodating players who prefer a more cautious approach." 

"Our team has spent three years building battle royale games from the ground up," Xaviant director of operations Josh Van Veld said. "We’ve taken all the lessons learned from the first title and poured them into this sequel. The Culling 2 represents our crystal-clear vision for what the genre should be: lean, mean, and a hell of a lot of fun." 

Unlike The Culling, which spent more than a year in Early Access on Steam, The Culling 2 will go straight into full release: Van Veld explained last month that calling a game "Early Access" doesn't change the fact that "every game launches once. 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 Steam page doesn't currently indicate a price but Xaviant said The Culling 2 will go for $20 or a regional equivalent.