The Culling

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

~ the last words ~

Battle royale became a genre without me. It showed up when i was thirty two, in a play style i had already stopped keeping current with, and i watched the whole thing happen from the outside without minding much. What earns The Culling a page anyway is that it was there before the money was, and it got none of it.

Xaviant had just finished Lichdom: Battlemage when they noticed how popular the last-player-standing mods built on top of other games had become, and decided to build a standalone one. It went into Steam early access on 4 march 2016. Sixteen players on an island or in a prison, fighting mostly with melee weapons rather than guns. Players who died had to stay in the match, which forced the studio to build a real spectator mode, and late in development they realized that mode was also what made the game watchable on stream.

For a few weeks it worked. The game climbed into the ten most played on Steam and peaked at 10,981 people online at once, which for a small studio out of Georgia was more than anyone had planned for. Then PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds hit early access in march 2017 and The Culling's numbers began falling away after that may. Full release came on 5 october 2017. In december Xaviant announced development was stopping so the team could work on a new title, and left the servers running.

The new title turned out to be a sequel to the game they had just abandoned. Xaviant announced The Culling 2 in mid-june 2018, by which point Fortnite had passed Battlegrounds and the market was as crowded as it would ever get. Leaked images drew immediate criticism from players of the first game for looking like Battlegrounds, which the studio's director of operations Josh Van Veld more or less confirmed was the intent, saying it reflected where the genre had gone. Match size went up to fifty.

~ the record ~

~ the eight days ~

The Culling 2 released on 10 july 2018 for Windows and both consoles, the same day a new Fortnite season started. Steam's peak player count on day one was around 250. Within forty hours it was down to one.

On 18 july Xaviant pulled the game from storefronts, closed its servers and refunded every purchase. Eight days of service life, which makes it the shortest-lived online game ever launched. The studio said it would go back to the original instead and rebuild it as free to play.

~ the second death ~

That rebuild, The Culling: Origins, restored the game to roughly what it had been in early access. In march 2019 Xaviant said revenue was not covering what it cost to keep running, delisted the game on the 25th, and switched the servers off on 15 may 2019, leaving only the offline modes.

It came back on 12 may 2020 on Xbox One with a pay-per-match model: one free match a day, then tokens sold in packs, or unlimited play at 1.99 dollars for a week. The reaction was bad enough that the free allowance was raised to ten matches a day within days. By 13 november 2020 the servers were down again and Xaviant had few or no people left supporting it. There was no announcement that time, which is why the date is soft.

~ what got buried with it ~

The design went with it, and the design was the interesting part. Sixteen players in close quarters crafting weapons under a clock is a different game from a hundred players on a map the size of a county, and once the genre standardized on the second thing the first thing had nowhere to live.

There is also nothing left to look at. The servers are gone and the store pages were delisted years apart, and xaviant.com does not answer at all now. A game that spent its whole life claiming to be first is harder to find today than any of the ones that copied it.

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