Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt

» see bloodhunt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Roughly six hundred players on a good day. That was the number Sharkmob gave when it announced on 27 October 2025 that Bloodhunt would stop, and it is the honest version of what happens to a free multiplayer game that nobody is working on anymore. The peak, three and a half years earlier, had been 29,008 people on Steam at once. The studio had tweeted about that one.

The premise was a good joke that somebody decided to build. Vampire: The Masquerade is a tabletop game from 1991 whose entire fiction turns on vampires keeping themselves secret from the human world, and the Masquerade is the name of the rule they all live under. Bloodhunt put sixteen of them in Prague and told them to kill each other in public. You climbed walls and threw yourself between rooftops, and you drank from bystanders to power your abilities, with a penalty for feeding in front of a witness. A battle royale built on a setting about not being seen is a stranger idea than most publishers would sign off on.

I was thirty-seven when it came out and had not been inside a competitive shooter since the internet cafe years, when Counter-Strike was what the machine on your left was running too. Battle royales arrived long after I stopped keeping up with any of that. This one I read about rather than played, and the reason it is here is the shape of its ending rather than anything I lost with it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it played ~

Unreal Engine 4, free to play, and on Windows and PlayStation 5 only. Early access opened on Steam on 7 September 2021 and the full release landed on 27 April 2022. Reviews came in respectable and unconvinced, around 75 out of 100 on both platforms, with critics circling the same point: the traversal was excellent and the genre it had been poured into was the most crowded one in the industry.

Sharkmob itself was new. Founded in Malmo in 2017 by people who had shipped The Division at Ubisoft Massive up the road, with a second office in London, and bought by Tencent in 2019 before it had released anything at all. Bloodhunt was its debut, and it was running two other projects alongside it the entire time.

~ the quiet years ~

On 15 May 2023, one year and eighteen days after the full launch, Sharkmob announced it was ending development. No more seasons, no more maps. The servers would stay up for the people still playing, which is a kinder thing to say than most studios manage.

So the last three years of Bloodhunt were a game maintained by nobody, playable by anybody, slowly emptying. There is a specific kind of online game that exists in this state, where the matchmaking still works because the remaining population has organized itself around the hours when enough of them log in together.

~ the last night ~

The announcement gave players six months, which is generous by the standards of this category. Token purchases were switched off the day it was made, though anything already in your account could still be spent in the store right up to the end. Sharkmob's wording was that the population had reached a level where keeping the servers running was no longer sustainable, and it asked people to enjoy the time that remained in Prague.

On 28 April 2026 the servers stopped and the game became unplayable on both platforms. Account and gameplay data was deleted afterward under GDPR, so the cosmetics people bought are gone along with the matches they were bought for. bloodhunt.com now answers with a redirect to sharkmob.com, where the studio is working on the next thing.

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