The Culling is one of the earliest entries into the battle royale genre featuring a 16 player brawl on a small island or prison with all the traits of the genre. Although the game lost steam against Fortnite and PUBG as they became the staple of the genre. The Culling’s developer Xaviant has made several attempts to remain competitive and released The Culling 2. The Culling 2’s never gained a following with its daily concurrent player base not growing more than two players. The servers were closed and the game was pulled from stores on July 18, 2018. On March 25, 2019, Xaviant shut down the servers for The Culling, pulled the game from Steam, and even let their ownership of The Culling’s website expire.
Apparently, Xaviant is not yet willing to give up on The Culling releasing a brand new relaunch trailer. The Culling will now be on Xbox along with new updates to its monetization scheme. Revealed in a developer diary, Xaviant revealed that to make The Culling profitable off their previous model they needed a large player base to justify the cost to run their servers.
Xaviant reduced their servers, in order to better perform with a lower player count, and instead of offering the game for free, it will now go for $6 for new adopters. Anyone on Xbox who owns the game already still has access to play the game. While the price is a lower entry fee, buying the game only grants one online game every twenty-four hours. Additional games can be purchased with tokens, which can be bought with real money. Xaviant is offering seven and thirty day unlimited online passes to be purchased as well.
Free online games can be achieved by winning matches and Xaviant is dropping their cosmetic loot boxes. With the reshuffling of the monetization model, all of the accounts are being reset back to level one and all of their cosmetics will be removed, forcing players to start from scratch. As of now, there is no PC edition of the game either.