Because The Culling is unsustainable.
Here’s something Xaviant doesn’t want to hear about The Culling: It is not a good game. While it might not be the worst thing since fermented haggis on limburger toast, it is definitely one of the lowest quality battle royale games that any developer has ever asked money for, let alone being far worse than other titles that are already available for free and by a developer that hasn’t abandoned their game months after launch three times. No amount of relaunches will turn this into a success and with every relaunch it just hurts Xaviant’s reputation.
But if there’s anything we have come to expect from Xaviant it is not learning anything from the company’s past failures and forging ahead off the end of a steep cliff into the next disaster. Take this quote from PC Gamer:
“In retrospect, it was really obvious that one was not going to give us the flow of players. But you have to remember, we were kind of terrified of everybody coming back, overloading the servers, costing us a tonne of money and not spending anything. So we were afraid to turn that dial.”
After the bomb that was The Culling 2 and Culling Origins free to play relaunch, I’m pretty sure an overwhelming response overloading the servers was never an issue. In fact as someone who played this relaunch on day one and couldn’t get a half-full lobby in a game of 16, I can guarantee that too much popularity is not a realistic problem for The Culling to face.
Here’s the thing about free to play; If you have a million players coming in and none of them are spending money, it’s because they don’t find enough value in the game to spend money on it. Fortnite can be played in its entirety without spending a dime and that game makes so much money that Epic is slowly buying the industry.
Maybe people weren’t buying cosmetics in The Culling because the game is entirely in first person and you never see it? Maybe it’s because the game is horribly unoptimized and runs terribly on the Xbox One? Maybe it’s because the game’s models look like early Xbox 360-era garbage. Do you honestly think that people are going to pay real money for this?
Xaviant says in the PC Gamer article that they onboarded a million new players very quickly but were spending tens of thousands of dollars per month in server costs which it couldn’t make back through cosmetics and crates. So the answer was to make your demand for money even more overbearing.
“If he could go back, Van Veld says that he’d pitch it differently and simplify things, believing that the model works but that the messaging was garbled. It doesn’t seem like a model that’s particularly easy to express in a way that’s appealing, however, especially when compared to the more conventional free-to-play method.”
No, the model doesn’t work. The Culling is a mediocre IP with a history of repeated failure that got some early success because it was literally the first to the draw. The relaunch managed to get some attention because it was free but failed to generate revenue because players didn’t see any value in it. The new model was almost universally hated not because of how it was expressed but because people saw it for what it was; a cynical, anti-consumer ripoff seemingly designed to punish buyers because Xaviant couldn’t competently overcome a hurdle that every developer in the industry has to navigate.
People didn’t hate the one-token-per-day model because you didn’t express it well enough, Josh. They hated it because the model is bad, The Culling definitely does not provide the quality to justify it, and Xaviant has neither the goodwill nor the reputation to demand it. The deadpan delivery with a thousand jump cuts didn’t help the situation, but the “expression” was only slightly more relevant to the backlash than your blue shirt.
We are still in week one of The Culling’s third launch and the queue is already dead. Again. That’s four bad launches for Xaviant and three of them were for the same game. Move on to the next IP.
MMO Fallout 