Development has ended on the toothsome battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt, its studio has announced.
Expansively-titled battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt has reached a somewhat unfortunate point in its life cycle: as of 15 May 2023, development has ended. Although the game will remain up and running for now, its studio Sharkmob has written on its website that support for the game has “come to an end” (thanks, Eurogamer).
“Ever since launch,” the studio wrote, “we have been on a journey to excite and delight our players, however, while we have an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development. This has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.”
Nevertheless, Sharkmob has pledged to keep Bloodhunt’s servers running for its current player base, and there are plans afoot for a final update that will support that community. “For those who enjoy the game and want to continue playing, we have worked on some solutions to ensure that the game continues to be interesting,” the post continues. “An in-game player voting system will be deployed to regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh. We will share more granular details about how this system works when we get closer to releasing our next update, which will be the last planned patch for Bloodhunt. Beyond that update, patches will only be related to maintenance.”
Currency purchases are also set to be turned off on 26 September as part of Sharkmob’s general winding-down process.
Bloodhunt launched just over a year ago for PC and PS5, and was loosely based on the tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. Set in a fictionalised Prague beset by bloodsucking ghouls, Bloodhunt was generally well-received, though its positioning in the free-to-play battle royale market inevitably meant it was up against the likes of Fortnite and Apex Legends.
“While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end,” Sharkmob concluded, “please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games.”
