The Culling 2 developer Xaviant has announced that it is delisting the recently released battle royale game from online marketplaces, refunding purchasers, and instead focusing its efforts on reviving and supporting the day-one build of the original The Culling.

Xaviant’s director of operations Josh Van Veld shared the company’s plans in a YouTube video released today, offering an apology to The Culling’s community for what he frames as a series of missteps from the studio, both in handling the post-Early Access version of The Culling 1 and the now failed sequel. 

The decision to take an online game offline is never an easy one, but doing so after just one week is almost unheard of. In the video above, Van Veld offers a frank look at why the Xaviant team felt this would be the best move and details the team’s plan to re-release the very first build of The Culling on test servers and support the game as it was in 2016. 

While the test servers host that early build, Xaviant says it plans to rework the most recent build of The Culling, release October 2017, to make it as close to that first Early Access build as possible. Additionally, with that eventual update, Van Veld notes that The Culling will instead become a free-to-play game. 

“When we thought back to day one of The Culling and how we handled that launch, we realized that we changed too much too fast and that there was something very unique and very special about the personality of that game that we were too eager to modify, to balance, to retune," says Van Veld. "And so we took a game that you guys loved, and we changed it out from under you, and I want to apologize for that."

"I also want to apologize because when we got to the end of our Early Access run,  you weren’t happy with the state of the game," continues Van Veld.  "We weren’t happy with our relationship with the community, we weren’t happy with how you felt about the game, we weren’t happy with the game ourselves, but we didn’t see a path forward. So we turned it off and we moved on to something else, and that was a mistake.”