12 months after launch, battle royale Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodhunt is ending development

Just 12 months after its full launch, development is ending on free-to-play battle royale game Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodhunt, with its developer Sharkmob blaming the title’s failure “reach the critical mass needed” to continue support.

Bloodhunt was announced toward the end of 2020 and, following a limited Steam early access release, recieved its full launch on PlayStation and PC last April. It offered players a vampiric spin on the well-worn battle royale formula, setting them loose across the rain-soaked, moon-drenched streets and rooftops of Prague, armed with supernatural parkour abilities and other clan-specific powers – plus, rather more boringly, guns.

It made for an interesting twist on a familiar genre – even if Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese didn’t much like the whole shooty thing when he played it back in early access – but that clearly wasn’t enough to attact and retain the kind of player base Bloodhunt needed.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodhunt announcement trailer.

In a post on the Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodhunt website, developer Sharkmob has now revealed that “while [the game had] an amazing and very engaged community, we haven’t been able to reach the critical mass needed to sustain development.” This, it explained, “has led us to the decision to stop further development of Bloodhunt.”

Active development is set to formally cease after one final content update – adding an in-game player voting system “to regularly unlock new things and keep Bloodhunt fresh” – and the game will then enter maintenance mode. However, servers will remain live, and the game will continue to be playable, “for as long as we have an active player base and community”.

Additionally, real currency purchasing ends on 26th September, but Sharkmob is implementing a way to more easily earn in-game tokens so players can continue to unlock cosmetics.

“While we are as sad as you are that Bloodhunt development has now come to an end,” the studio concluded, “please know that this was a difficult decision to make, and we take this experience with us in the development of coming games.”

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