Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt battle royale game to cease development

Continuing the 2023 purge of live service titles, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt, Sharkmob’s multiplayer battle royale spinoff of the popular RPG franchise, will end development slightly more than a year following its release. The developers plan to keep the servers on for as long as possible, and end its microtransactions and in-game currency ecosystem in the coming months.

In a post titled “The Future of Bloodhunt” on the game’s website, the developers explain what has caused them to halt further development on the game. “Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.”

Although new substantial content will no longer be produced, the developers plan on keeping the game interesting via an “in-game player voting system“, which will be explained further in the near future. After the next update introducing this system, all future updates will be purely for maintenance. Sharkmob also plans on turning off the option to spend real currency on September 26th of this year. Leading up to this date, the developers will make in-game tokens easier to earn so that players can acquire cosmetic unlocks beyond that date.

Despite the unconventional premise, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt did manage to cultivate a following and decent reviews throughout its relatively short lifetime. Unfortunately, following the demise of fellow live service multiplayer titles such as Knockout City and Lemnis Gate, it’s just hard to maintain a large audience to constantly be playing your game when there is so much competition. Battle royale games in particular require a larger audience than most, and well, not every game can be Fortnite. On the plus side, unlike the aforementioned titles, Bloodhunt’s servers will remain online, at least for the time being.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt will be continued to be supported until its next patch, after which the game types will be determined by the in-game player voting system. Sharkmob has confirmed that it will use its experience from this game on future projects. Hopefully the team’s next game will be met with more success. For those seeking a more traditional solo Vampire: The Masquerade title, a 2023 release date for the long-delayed Vampire: The Masquerade 2 is “absolutely not impossible” according to Paradox Interactive CEO Fredrik Wester.