New Battle Royale Game Removed From Sale After A Week As Dev Offers Surprisingly Frank Apology

The Culling 2 launched recently, but it went so poorly that the studio is issuing a mea culpa and reversing course entirely. In a statement from Xaviant director of operations Josh Van Veld, he acknowledged that the sequel was not up to snuff, and promised to do better.

"That launch was not successful," he said in the video above. "The Culling 2 is not a game that you asked for, and it's not the game that you expect as a worthy successor to The Culling." As a result, he said, Xaviant is in touch with the various storefronts to pull the game and issue refunds.

Going forward, Xaviant will be going back to the original The Culling. That's not just relying on the older game--Van Veld said the studio "changed too much too fast" in the first game, and in the process disrupted what fans had enjoyed about it. For that, he apologized, and said that the original game is coming back. The original build, before it had undergone any changes, will be coming to test servers for PC players, and remain there and playable for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, the team will be making the current version that's on regular servers and modifying it to imitate the original build and using that as its platform to build upon. That version will be made free-to-play once the update comes, to invite back lapsed players and grow the audience. Fans had expressed dissatisfaction since the studio moved on from the first game very quickly, and then launched The Culling 2 without an Early Access version first.

"It's definitely been difficult to deal with the launch of The Culling 2, but it's been valuable for us in terms of making us look inward and look backward and see how we got here as a studio and as a team," Van Veld said.

This follows a week of some very frank admissions on social media, first saying it needed to do some soul-searching, and then following up the next day with a meme poking fun at its problematic game launch: