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Xaviant has announced that The Culling will shut its doors in May, with the game's transition to a free-to-play model having failed to turn things around for the troubled scavenge-'em-up.
Josh Van Veld, director of operations at Xaviant, explained the move in a post on The Culling's website.
'When we launched the Origins update and made the game free to play, our hope was that the revenue generated from in-app purchases would be enough to sustain our team and support ongoing development,' he said.
'Even with thousands of active daily users, the revenue was only a fraction of what our dev team required to continue daily operations. As a result, we've been forced to reduce our team size, which renders us unable to provide ongoing support and updates that would allow the game to grow and thrive.'
The Culling will be taken offline on May 15, although offline modes will continue for some time after.
Xaviant hasn't had an easy ride as of late. Last summer, the developer announced The Culling 2, a game that nobody really asked for and wasn't much cop at all. It flopped, and so the developer decided to launch the original as a free-to-play title in hopes of getting back on track.
The Culling was originally released via Early Access back in 2016, before rolling out on PC and Xbox One the following year.
