Just Survive

~ the obit ~

Just Survive's entire life fits inside a stretch when I already had a Steam account and no appetite left for buying software that was not finished. Early access asked you to pay first and then wait for the game to arrive, which is a reasonable deal at twenty-five and a strange one at thirty-one with a job. I watched the survival genre from a distance and never put an hour into it.

The game launched on 15 January 2015 as H1Z1, from Sony Online Entertainment, which had been sold to an investment firm and renamed Daybreak Game Company two weeks later. It sold over a million copies in its first two months. Its pitch was the one DayZ had already proven: a large map, other players who were the actual threat, and zombies as the background noise that made the map dangerous to cross.

It was never a finished product at any point in its life. It went into early access in 2015 and it was still in early access when Daybreak switched it off in 2018, which means for its entire existence it was legally a work in progress and commercially a full-price game.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the split ~

In February 2016 Daybreak cut the game in two. The survival sandbox stayed as H1Z1: Just Survive. The last-player-standing mode, which had started as one game type inside it, left as H1Z1: King of the Kill with its own team and its own store page. Everybody who owned the original was given both.

King of the Kill went on to fill an arena in Las Vegas for a tournament with a car as first prize, and eventually renamed itself Z1 Battle Royale. Just Survive got the smaller half of the studio and dropped the H1Z1 prefix in August 2017, because by then the prefix belonged to the other game. That rename is the moment the parent brand chose a side.

~ the cracks ~

Late in 2017 the team rebuilt the game around a new map called Badwater Canyon and retired the original Z1 map that the remaining players had spent two years learning. The intent was a smaller and tighter world. What it did was delete the specific place a shrinking population had built its habits around, and a lot of them did not follow.

The numbers tell the rest without much help. Just Survive peaked at 12,518 concurrent players in February 2017. By August 2018 the peak for the month was 592. Meanwhile PUBG and Fortnite had taken the mode that used to be a submenu of this game and turned it into the biggest thing in the industry, and every dollar of attention at Daybreak went that direction.

~ the postmortem ~

The announcement came in the last week of August 2018. Purchases were disabled that day, the Steam store page came down on 26 August, and the servers were given until 24 October. Daybreak's wording was that it was no longer in a position to deliver on the game's potential, which is the polite version of a population too small to justify the hardware.

Two months of notice for a survival game is a particular kind of ending. The whole appeal of the genre is accumulation, a base that took weeks and a stash you defended, and a shutdown date converts all of it into a countdown. Players spent October doing the only thing left, which was giving everything away and burning the rest. The servers went at eleven in the morning Pacific time and the game has not been playable since, in any form.

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