PvPvE shooter Scavengers will shut down without ever leaving Early Access

Scavengers Art — (Image credit: Midwinter Entertainment)

Battle Royale meets survival PvE shooter Scavengers is shutting down on December 16, 2022, just a year and seven months after launching. It was launched as an early access game on both Steam and the Epic store, and was pretty well-received at the time, but failed to find a persistent audience in the time since.

It's a bitter end for the few who've found a dedicated game in Scavengers, or those who've spent money on microtransactions in it, since the last they really heard from the game owners was in March. A post titled Farewell, Cascade Springs made the announcement on Scavengers' website.

It certainly didn't help that the Scavengers developer Midwinter was sold by owner Improbable Worlds in May of this year. Improbable Worlds made the decision to pivot to the Metaverse, and sold Midwinter to Dead by Daylight's publisher. Improbable has been around for a while but Scavengers was really its only big release, and this leaves them with not much going on . If they truly are betting on the Metaverse, that may well be the last you hear of Improbable Worlds Limited here at PC Gamer.

Scavengers described itself as a "strategic survival battleground" involving three-person squads who "compete to survive and dominate in a hybrid of sandbox-style PVE and class-based PVP." With a roster of pre-made characters, it was something like a class shooter with the PvPvE Battle Royale bolted on top. It was pretty much bland gaming comfort food and only those who approached it that way seemed to like it. (Sorry, Rich.)

Scavengers was available on the Epic Store and on Steam. It's still on the Epic Store as of publishing, but it's no longer able to be downloaded on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.