[UPDATED] The Culling Returns With a Bang to Customer Wallets
CORRECTION/UPDATE: 18/05/2020 — Some information relayed in the original article below, while once being true, at the time of writing was inaccurate. While in the dev vlog the DOP claimed that there would only be 1 free game a day, it seems in response to the outrage this got increased to 25 free games a day, as confirmed by MMOFallout in their coverage of the game. This flew under my radar during the coverage as there wasn’t much (if any) media attention on this fact, Xaviant did put a tweet up as the game launched to Xbox One saying that they had raised the games to 10, but this also seems to no longer be the case and it is now 25.
I am not in possession of an Xbox One hence I had no means of personally verifying this myself, so again, thanks to Connor of MMOFallout for throwing the correction my way.
Additionally, the tweet reveals that if you win in an offline match, you also get a token to play an online match.
Original article follows below
The Culling, the game that was considered to be the hot game in Steam early access back in March 2016 has had a very rocky development lifetime. This article isn’t going to be for that as I think that in and of its self is worth its own article in the future on the history of The Culling as well as Xaviant (the developer and publisher of The Culling) in general. Just to give a quick digest for those unfamiliar, The Culling is considered to be one of the original and first standalone battle royale games and it got attention because it was noticeably different compared to it’s at the time notably fewer competitors as it was just 16 players in a map and it wasn’t as gun focussed and was more traps, with crafting as well. People loved the game when it launched into early access, however, an evolving market that Xaviant failed to keep up with as well as bringing in updates that fans saw as making the game worse drove players away from The Culling and onto some of its more popular competitors such as Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
The game was abandoned by its developers not once, but twice. It was left in limbo for some time until being abruptly being labeled as fully released only for just a short while later to announce The Culling 2 which received very negative reviews from users and critics alike.
After The Culling 2’s failure, to shake things up a bit, Xaviant pulled The Culling 2 from sale, apologized for the game and went ahead and started work back up again on the original Culling with two catches: the game would be reverted back to its state at the start of early access and the game would turn free to play and the game would be including microtransactions. The game saw a healthy boost to its player base, I tried it, I enjoyed it but I kind of stopped playing it after a couple of weeks just because it didn’t maintain my interest and it seems it was that way for most other people. Xavian announced servers were to shut down for The Culling and that was that.
Until today.
In the last week, Xavian announced that The Culling would be making a not-so-triumphant return to the video game landscape with The Culling’s servers being turned back on after being shuttered the last time it failed to get a consistent cash flow into Xaviant’s pockets. Third time’s the charm? I like to think not in this case. It’s rare that I hope a game fails, but I don’t like to think of the precedent that this would set if this game succeeds. This is because of the monetization of the game that’s been introduced after The Culling launched on Xbox One just yesterday,
So what is this new business model? Well, as outlined in the above video by Xaviant’s DOP Josh Van Veld, The Culling has gone against being free to play, there’s now an upfront RRP of $5.99 and here’s the best bit: you have to pay for matches.
The game grants you one free match per day. The way you get more matches is by either winning matches which gives you another free game or by paying with tokens. The tokens are priced as follows:
3-pack — $0.99
10-pack — $2.99
20-pack — $4.99
There is also “unlimited online passes” that you can get which grants you unlimited matches for a period of time, you get a 7-day pass by paying $1.99 and a 30-day pass by paying $5.99
As stated, this is currently implemented on Xbox One with the game being re-released and they voiced plans in the video to bring this to PC as well. With this being on Xbox One to put it into perspective, Xbox One users to play The Culling will not only pay the $5.99 upfront fee and the essentially monthly subscription to The Culling of $5.99 for unlimited access, but they also need to pay for Xbox Live as well. I know that Xaviant isn’t seeing any money from Xbox Live subscriptions, but I’m more so pointing out how much people need to pay to play this on Xbox One.
As stated, my take is that this is a terrible business model that’s incredibly anti-consumer and I do genuinely hope this fails as if this succeeds it will just motivate other companies to incorporate this into their business models as well.
I said this back when The Culling 2 launched, Xaviant has only been making these rash and poor business decisions and becoming so reliant on The Culling to succeed in some way because I believe they’re on financial hard times and they think this will improve it. If you said this to me a year or so ago I would say if Xaviant keeps this up they will go out of business. With this though, I feel this decision, this move has not made it a question on “if” Xaviant will be shut down but it’s more a question of “when.” I feel it’s impending as they clearly aren’t funding their company well enough, they’ve come up with poor monetization attempts for The Culling over the years and they’ve failed to even get a game to a state that kept people engaged in the first place. The Culling 2, in my opinion, was made slapdash and on the cheap just to get sales as quickly as possible because the company was struggling. The Culling’s move to free to play and money off microtransactions then might have helped them a little but not substantially enough since the game got shut down and they’re now attempting a third resurfacing of this game they just need to let die.
When Xaviant shut in the next 6–12 months, I won’t be happy to report on their closing as it will mean developers will be out of a job and I hope for them to get good work in the future, but when it does happen I’ll be sure that Xaviant’s story is known so that other startup developers won’t be making the same mistakes.
Also, the Xaviant unveiling video is 98% dislikes as of writing this up, just let that sink in.
