The Culling 2

Autopsy Report

The Culling 2 holds a record that nobody wants: it is one of the fastest and most complete commercial failures in Steam history. Launched on July 9, 2018, pulled from sale approximately 48 hours later, and sporting a 16% positive review rate — one of the lowest scores on the platform — it didn’t so much die as arrive dead and immediately begin decomposing.

The numbers are almost absurdist. 157 total reviews. 25 positive. 132 negative. A review velocity of 1.7 per month — less engagement in thirty days than most games generate in thirty minutes. An estimated 20,000-50,000 owners, many of whom likely refunded within Steam’s two-hour window. And the peak concurrent player count on launch day? Reportedly in the single digits. For a 50-player battle royale. A game that needed fifty people in the same server to function couldn’t find fifty people on the entire platform who wanted to play it simultaneously.

The fundamental sin was an identity crisis so complete it bordered on self-parody. The original Culling was known for one thing: melee combat. It was the battle royale where you crafted weapons, built traps, and fought with rocks and machetes in tense 16-player encounters. The Culling 2 replaced all of that with 50-player gunplay, “real-world weapon ballistics,” and a generic third-person shooting experience that was competing directly with Fortnite and PUBG. It answered the question nobody asked: “What if The Culling, but without the things that made it The Culling?”

The Steam tags tell the story better than any review. Community-applied tags include “Memes,” “Psychological Horror,” “Walking Simulator,” “Anime,” “Dating Sim,” and “Illuminati.” These aren’t genre classifications — they’re a community’s verdict rendered in sarcasm. The fact that these joke tags replaced any legitimate genre tag means the Steam community didn’t even acknowledge The Culling 2 as a real product. It was content for reaction videos.

Xaviant pulled the game within roughly 48 hours and issued a public apology, acknowledging that The Culling 2 “did not meet the standards” players expected. They announced plans to return to the original Culling. But the damage was comprehensive: Xaviant had now failed twice — first by patching The Culling to death, then by shipping a sequel that abandoned everything the original stood for. Whatever goodwill remained from The Culling’s early days was incinerated in a 48-hour bonfire.

The owners-to-review ratio of 127:1 suggests that the vast majority of the 20K-50K people who purchased the game either refunded, never played long enough to form an opinion, or simply couldn’t find a match. With peak concurrent players in single digits, most purchasers likely opened the game, found empty servers, and closed it permanently. The Culling 2 is the rare case of a game so non-functional on arrival that the “broken at launch” label is almost generous — it implies there was something there to be broken.

Key Failure Factors

• 16% Positive — Bottom of Steam: Only 25 of 157 reviewers found something positive to say. A 16% positive rate puts The Culling 2 in the same review tier as asset flips and scam products. For a game from an established studio with a recognized franchise name, this is unprecedented.

• Peak Players: Single Digits: A 50-player battle royale that peaked at approximately 2 concurrent players couldn’t fill a single match. The game was architecturally incapable of delivering its core experience from the moment it launched.

• Identity Suicide: Replacing The Culling’s unique melee combat, crafting, and 16-player format with generic 50-player gunplay abandoned the only audience that might have been sympathetic. The sequel competed directly with Fortnite and PUBG — and lost by every conceivable metric.

• Meme Tags as Epitaph: The Steam community replaced the game’s genre tags with “Memes,” “Psychological Horror,” “Walking Simulator,” and “Dating Sim.” When your product page is indistinguishable from a joke, you don’t have a product.

Lessons for Developers

1. A sequel must understand what made the original work. The Culling 2 abandoned melee combat, crafting, and the intimate format — the exact features that defined the original. The 16% positive rate versus the original’s 57% is a 41-point penalty for abandoning your identity. The 157 total reviews versus 17,275 shows the audience simply didn’t show up.

2. Don’t ship a game that can’t fill its own matches. A 50-player game needs 50 concurrent players to function. The Culling 2 reportedly peaked at 2. Before shipping multiplayer, verify that your realistic player projection can support the minimum match size — otherwise you’re shipping a loading screen.

3. Community trust is non-renewable once exhausted. Xaviant had already burned trust by patching The Culling to death. The Culling 2 proved there was no goodwill left. The 99% drop in review volume (157 vs. 17,275) shows the community had already written Xaviant off before the sequel launched.

Related Deaths

• Artifact — Valve’s card game that launched to empty lobbies and was effectively abandoned within weeks, sharing the “dead on arrival” pattern with peak players that couldn’t sustain the core gameplay.
• Crucible — Amazon’s hero shooter that was pulled from sale, returned to beta, and then permanently cancelled, sharing The Culling 2’s rare “pulled from store” trajectory.
• The Culling (original) — The same studio’s previous game had 110x more reviews and a 41-point higher review score, documenting exactly how far Xaviant fell.