It was bound to end this way, but even so, this one hurts. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt, the first and only battle royale I've ever been much good at (and thus the only one I ever really loved), is going away for good in April 2026.
"During these past 4 years, we have been thrilled to see your passion and dedication to Bloodhunt," developer Sharkmob wrote in the closure announcement. "Your feedback, creativity, and enthusiasm for our game has meant the world to us. However, despite you, our amazing community, the current player population has reached a level where keeping the servers running is no longer sustainable. This has led us to make the difficult decision to take Bloodhunt offline.
"The sun is now going to rise over Prague. We will be taking down the Bloodhunt servers on the 28th of April 2026, after which the game will no longer be available."
This outcome became inevitable more than two years ago, when Sharkmob decided to stop working on Bloodhunt, also a consequence of insufficient players. The studio said at the time that game servers would be kept online "for as long as we have an active player base and community," and it retooled some aspects of the game to help keep coming back. But the reality is that once you've crossed that line, it's game over, and player counts have been slowly sagging ever since, typically bracketing the 500 concurrents range: Enough to keep it playable, but not really viable.
So, here we are today, at the end of the line. Which sucks, because Bloodhunt is a really good battle royale, and a legit Vampire game to boot: It doesn't have the depth of an RPG like Bloodlines, naturally, but it nails the ambience of a gothic city at night whose shadows hide scheming legions of ancient power.
My biggest complaint about Bloodhunt is that the demands of a battle royale kept me from exploring the city at my own pace: I think a no red gas option (red gas being Bloodhunt's taken on the ever-closing battle royale ring of death), allowing players to fight but not forcing them into it, would've been a lot of fun as an optional game mode.
Anyway, no matter now, because the red gas is closing in on all of us and we've got six months left to enjoy Bloodhunt's unlife: It's set to go down for good on April 28, 2026.
