The Culling 2 developer, Josh Van Veld, has recently come forward to apologize for the game and talk more about the reaction towards it. As far as we’re concerned, The Culling 2 will go down in history as a game that gave up its creative spark in order to cash in on the battle royale hype despite it already having an established community with its original game. To quote Veld, “[they] made a game that nobody asked for” and suffered for it.
Not only did it release at a terrible time, but the game had a lot going against it. For one the near extortionate price of £17 on PS4, XB1, and PC was never going to go down well with some players and the lack of individual creativity left much to be desired from Xaviant. What’s more, at its most hyped there were only 249 players on the servers, which clearly isn’t exactly a thriving fan base that’s suitable for a game like The Culling 2.
It’s these issues that Veld brought up when discussing the mistakes of The Culling 2 and why, thanks to much reflecting on Xaviant’s part, the official decision is to remove copies (both digital and physical) of the game from Steam, PS4 and XB1 as well as refund those who bought the game. Removing the game is a disheartening choice, but one that we feel is necessary in order for the studio to rise from the ashes of the garbage fire and take back some of the ground they lost with their fans.
But that isn’t all Xaviant plan to do. According to the YouTube message, Veld has stated that the team at Xaviant will go back to the early build of the original game, The Culling, make it free-to-play, and develop it from there. This will no doubt please fans of the original game, as well as hopefully attract some new players too.
You can watch the full apology video below.