A year and a half after launch, Ubisoft is officially ending development of Hyper Scape and will be shutting down its servers. While the game saw substantial hype at launch, it quickly dropped off the radar. As a result, Ubisoft quietly stopped supporting the game long before this announcement. Hyper Scape servers will go offline on April 28, 2022.
Why is Hyper Scape Dead?
Even though today marks the official announcement that development has ended on Hyper Scape, the last update for the game came in April 2021. After that, Ubisoft went silent, and the game never progressed past season 3. Hyper Scape‘s director, Jean-Christophe Guyot, seems to have joined a new studio in April 2021, which coincides with the end of the game’s support. However, even though the game was abandoned, Ubisoft continued to sell microtransactions and battle passes.
The studio confirmed the end of development with this post:
We have made the difficult decision to end development of Hyper Scape and shut the game down as of April 28th. We set out to create a vertical, close-quarters, and fast-paced shooter experience and we are extremely grateful to our community for joining us on our journey. We will be taking key learnings from this game into future products.
To the Hyper Scape community, thank you for your passion and dedication to the world of Neo Arcadia both inside and outside of the game. Your devotion to the game we built will always be cherished.
Hyper Scape‘s death comes as a result of a lack of commitment from Ubisoft and oversaturation of the battle royale genre. Aside from the initial push, during which Ubisoft paid major streamers to play the game, there was little marketing. The company tried to surprise launch Hyper Scape as EA did with Apex Legends. However, streamers quickly lost interest when the cash ran out, and a community refused to coalesce around the game.
Posts in the game’s subreddit indicate that players are typically unable to find the 60 (down from 100 at launch) players needed to fill a match. So it’s been on life support for a while, and it was inevitable that Ubisoft would pull the plug. Having a game flop after a two-year development cycle and a massive initial marketing campaign can’t have been good for Ubisoft’s bottom line. Unfortunately, there’s no available financial data concerning the game. Still, we bet that it’s probably one of the company’s most costly failures.
In other news, gameplay of the canceled Star Wars 1313 leaked, and Crusader Kings 3 is PS5-bound this Spring.
[Source: Ubisoft]
