The Culling 2 and its phenomenally catastrophic launch

Some games suffer a rough start, struggling to attract a decent sized audience and selling less than what the developer / publisher projected. Other times games completely and utterly flop. The Culling 2 is undeniably part of that second category.

Releasing on to Steam on July 10th, The Culling 2 is a followup to a pretty successful game. In fact, The Culling was one of the original Battle Royale games, helping to start the phenomenon of the last-man-standing genre that is so prolific within the industry today. The Culling had tens of thousands of players before games like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite Battle Royale ever came on to the market. So its sequel should have been a big deal, right?

Unfortunately the release of The Culling 2 was anything but successful. In fact, the game had dropped to a mere 2 players less than 48 hours after launch on Steam. The woeful Steam Chart statistics speak for themselves.

Developer Xaviant took to Twitter only a few days after The Culling 2’s launch to bear some bad news about the probable future of the studio. The message is grim.

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.

We’ll talk soon.

— Xaviant (@Xaviant) July 12, 2018

A developer on the brink of closure and a game with a 50 player count that can barely attract a lobby of 3. The Culling 2 is certainly one of the more catastrophic game launches of all time. So what went wrong?

Unfortunately the game is launching into a marketplace already booming with Battle Royale games. The Culling may have been fairly unique when it first released but all of that uniqueness is long gone in today’s gaming sphere. The Steam reviews from those who have actually bought the game aren’t kind either, with the game sitting on a “very negative” score. Suddenly the game’s failure is starting to make a bit more sense.

So what’s next for Xaviant and the future of The Culling series? I guess only time will tell, although it’s not looking bright.