Just two years after the release of battle royale game Hyper Scape, Ubisoft has announced that it is shutting the game down in April of 2022. It’s not the first game to try to ride the wave of the current trend and fail—Battleborn comes to mind—but this shutdown is a pretty quick turnaround. It can be difficult to seize momentum in a space already full of popular games, and it seems that this was one battle royale that just didn’t quite cut it.
Ubisoft revealed Hyper Scape only a short time ago, in the summer of 2020. At the time, it appeared to be a basic battle royale with a bit of a twist, eschewing custom loadouts in favor of gamers picking up everything as the game progressed, as well as allowing players to upgrade their guns by finding the same gun again. Combined with many different abilities running the gamut from useful to silly, Hyper Scape offered enough to feel like more than just a clone of other popular battle royale games like Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone. However, after initially high player numbers driven by collaborations with content creators, interest in Hyper Scape quickly waned, while its competitors continued to enjoy the lion’s share of gamer interest.
Now, a Ubisoft blog post has announced that Hyper Scape will officially shut down in April, less than two years after the game’s launch. The post is brief, only saying that the developers will take what they’ve learned from the game and incorporate that into future projects, as well as thanking what community the game did have. There’s no mention of any events or rewards for those who play through to the end, as sometimes happens when games shut down. All told, it’s a sudden, quiet end for the game, which certainly hadn’t seen the engagement for which Ubisoft had been hoping.
That said, this wasn’t for lack of trying. When Ubisoft announced season two of Hyper Scape, the list of changes to the game showed that the company had listened to complaints about balance, cross-play, and overall combat. The team behind the game literally restructured to provide tighter focus on development goals. All of this suggested that Ubisoft had high hopes for Hyper Scape and was committed to improving the game and making it what fans wanted it to be. However, it’s possible that these changes came too late to save the game, since its player-base had already dwindled. Whatever the case, it seems that Hyper Scape just couldn’t ever quite live up to its potential.
This isn’t the first time Ubisoft has tried to cash in on what’s currently popular, and it won’t be the last. The company is already embracing NFTs with its “Ubisoft Quartz” program, which has gotten some mixed reviews. Maybe the company will try a battle royale again someday. In the meantime, Hyper Scape goes off into the sunset.
Source: Ubisoft