The Culling servers are going offline forever in May. The game’s developers announced the server shutdown earlier today. Xaviant Games made The Culling free to play last fall, hoping the move would keep the game afloat.
Josh Van Veld, director of operations at Xaviant announced the news today. “The game’s servers have run continuously (with the stray outage here and there) for three years, but the time has come for us to announce that we will be taking The Culling offline on May 15th, 2019.” He went on to say that the game’s microtransactions will be pulled as soon as possible.
As of this writing, that content is still available for purchase on Steam. The Culling‘s two Steam packages are a $24.99 “Founder’s Pack” and a $9.99 “Starter Pack.” Hopefully, those DLC contents will be pulled soon and people don’t end up buying content for a nearly dead game. The in-game store is also still up as of this writing, with purchases ranging from $4.99 to $99.99 still available.
The Culling‘s offline modes will remain available to play, although much of the game’s functionality is lost without the online servers. Xaviant published The Culling in 2016, following by a sequel in July 2018. The second Culling game released to an abysmal launch and was pulled from Steam a little over a week after it launched.
As a result, The Culling Day One Reference was released for free to owners of the game. The day one build of The Culling was often lauded as the best version of the game, with new additions bogging down the game. That game became The Culling: Origins and was the game’s final iteration.
The Culling servers could end up being run by the game’s community or another game company, as today’s announcement suggests. For now, The Culling is dead in the water thanks to games like Fortnite and Apex Legends, and a development studio that didn’t know what their community wanted.
