Since 2016, the Battle Royale Klopper The Culling has been trying repeatedly to achieve a happy ending. To be successful. After a strong launch, things have been going downhill for years. Patches, Free2Play conversion, an entertaining successor – nothing helped. Now another relaunch should bring the rescue. But the community is primarily angry.
What has happened there?
Looking back: That was The Culling
The Culling was a battle royale with melee focus and a small 16-player format. The game started in 2016 and at times gathered over 12,000 players simultaneously on Steam. However, the number of players dropped quickly. The criticism: Gameplay updates had basically taken the wrong direction.
To the Battle Royale hype in 2018, the developers wanted to score with a PUBG clone called The Culling 2, but also failed and took the game offline after only one week. The already annoyed community was not enthusiastic about the urgent follow-up project, the rest of the gaming world had better alternatives with PUBG and Fortnite. Finally, Xaviant switched the first part to a Free2Play model and rolled back almost all the updates to help bring the game to a second spring under the name The Culling: Origins. However, this did not materialize and Xaviant then completely stopped the multiplayer support.
This is how The Culling should be now
Josh Van Veld, director of operations at developer Xaviant, now turns to the community in a YouTube video to talk about the The future of The Culling to speak. The Battle Royale is coming back – already on May 14, 2020. A PC version is also in the works, but will take a little longer due to "special challenges".
But the supposedly good news is far from being well received. The high-risk business model ensures the big excitement. Because The Culling wants to make money in several ways:
- The game itself costs $ 6
- only one match per day is free of charge
- a win brings a free »online match token« – so only those who have a winning series can continue playing
- Losers must purchase additional match tokens: 3 tokens ($ 1), 10 tokens ($ 3), 20 tokens ($ 5)
- alternatively a weekly ($ 2) or monthly subscription ($ 6)
Thus, The Culling will rely on one in the future Mix of Pay2Play, access paywall and subscription model. After the game had to accept some criticism in the past, the already disappointed fans react extremely negatively to this message.
Angry reactions
On YouTube, users shower the video with downvotes and post angry comments. Now the video is coming up over 6,000 downvotes and 250 upvotes with around 36,000 views.
So Xaviant wants to build on the greatest success of The Culling so far. A difficult undertakingif you look at the story of the game, which is accompanied by massive criticism. In the end, the amounts may be small on an individual basis, but asking for money per match after the player had to buy the product – this is community dynamite.
Ultimately, the players have to decide whether the relaunch can help the failed Battle Royale again. Given the reactions so far, this is at least questionable.
