Vampire: The Masquerade battle royale is ending development after last year's launch
High stakes genre
Free-to-play battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt is ending development a year after launch, the team at Sharkmob have announced. That means the game won’t receive frequent updates in the future. Sharkmob points to their limited player base, which made sustainable development difficult for the battle royale, although servers will remain online indefinitely, as long as there’s an “active player base and community.”
Bloodhunt first entered an early access release in 2021 before launching in full just twelve months ago. Set in the troubled Vampire: The Masquerade universe (hence the name), Bloodhunt put you in the shoes of superpowered vampires with guns. Hunting humans gives you fancier powers, which you then use against other players, hopping from one rooftop to the next. The trailers made it seem fun at least.
“Ever since launch, we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players,” the studio wrote in a blog post. “However, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development.”
For the bloodsuckers that are still playing, Bloodhunt’s servers will remain active and the game will be available to play “as long as we have an active player base and community.” Sharkmob have one final update planned to introduce a player voting system that will “regularly unlock new things,” but the team will share more about that closer to its release. Aside from that, the team plans to turn off real money microtransactions on September 26th and will introduce an easier way to unlock in-game tokens, so you can keep unlocking funky hairstyles into the future. Beyond that, updates will be relegated to maintenance patches only. You can still download Bloodhunt for free on Steam.
Seems like the battle royale boom is over, as there simply aren’t enough players to spread across every single game. Every few months another battle royale bites the dust, leaving the big ‘uns to sweep up the leftovers and duke it out for a victory crown, or a chicken dinner, or some XP I guess.
As for the long-awaited Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, publisher Paradox had previously considered cancelling the game before handing development to a new unnamed studio. Paradox then said they were “happy with progress”, but the developers are still a secret for some reason.