Sharkmob announced yesterday that the team will be ending development on Bloodhunt, their battle royale game set in the Vampire: The Masquerade universe and that it will remain online “for as long as we have an active player base”. Unable to reach a sustainable core of active paying players, the free-to-play game will see one final update later this year before going into maintenance-only mode. The team expects in-game purchases to be disabled around September 26th.
Bloodhunt is a game that we developed as a standout title in the popular Battle Royale genre, where we focused on creating an immersive and unique experience for players that enjoy games that are easy to learn but difficult to master.
Ever since launch, 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.
With that said, Bloodhunt servers will stay up and the game will remain available to play. Our aim is to keep the servers going for as long as we have an active player base and 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. 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.
We are also looking at turning off real currency purchasing on September 26th. Before this happens, we will implement a way to earn in-game tokens more easily so players can continue to play and unlock cosmetics beyond this date.
While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end, please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games.
We hope you will still have many enjoyable experiences in Bloodhunt, and we look forward to seeing you on the streets of Prague!
Bloodhunt Announcement – May 15, 2023
The game has maintained a few thousand active players on Steam since July of 2022 and it’s only just begun trending downward. If the decline continues I could see the game being shut down at the end of the calendar year in December or with the end of the fiscal calendar around March 2024. Anyone interested can jump into the free-to-play game on Steam or PlayStation 5 until more news is announced.
Thanks to Serrated-banner9 for submitting the news. I’ve added the potential date to the Watch List calendar and we’ll have a page up on the site later.