Developer Xaviant pulled the plug on the battle royale game The Culling in December 2017, just a couple of months after taking it from Early Access to full release. Today, the studio revealed that a sequel, The Culling 2, is now in development.
2 pic.twitter.com/onuTxYYwbqJune 14, 2018
There are no details yet beyond the tweet and the fact that the account is now called The Culling 2, but it's a surprising move for Xaviant to make. The average concurrent player count of The Culling when development was ended was 14, and it hadn't been above double digits since May 2017. And it's not as though the battle royale genre has become less crowded and competitive since then: The Culling's player count started tanking right around the time we described Fortnite as "a fun but bloated base defense shooter," and we all know what's happened since then.
(And if you don't know, the short version is that Fortnite is a juggernaut and there are plenty of other smaller-but-good BR games to choose from too.)
I also wonder if the quickness with which Xaviant hit the brakes on The Culling (and to be clear, the servers are still up, so it's not dead, just abandoned) will work against it, particularly with work on a sequel beginning so soon after. If nothing else, it doesn't strike me as a good look.
I've reached out to Xaviant to ask about its plans for the new game and will update if I receive a reply. Either way, I expect we'll be hearing more about The Culling 2 very soon.
