Futuristic Battle Royale Hyper Scape Is Shutting Down In April

Ubisoft is pulling the plug on Hyper Scape, its fast-paced, VR-styled, futuristic battle royale that launched in mid-2021. Despite an aggressive media campaign that included a heavy emphasis on Twitch streaming, the game's population fell off shortly after launch and never recovered.

The game's fortunes were looking so bad even at the end of 2020 that I predicted it wouldn't survive 2021. It did, but only barely, as today's announcement states that the servers will be shut down on April 28. Ubisoft will be "taking key learnings from this game into future products," which it has no lack of, with the likes of Ghost Recon Frontline, Tom Clancy's XDefiant, and The Division Heartland all in the works.

This is the point where I usually point out how obvious it was that a game failed, due to some poor decision the developers made that anyone from outside the company could have seen coming from a mile away. With Hyper Scape, though, I'm a little at a loss for words. I played a decent bit, maybe 10 hours or so, and while my reflexes certainly weren't up to par to compete with the game's frenetic pace, I didn't see anything about it that I thought was egregiously awful. Maybe it was too fast, or the shiny-and-futuristic-though-kinda-bland environment turned people off. Whatever the case, let's hope Ubisoft got the feedback it needed so that its future games don't suffer the same fate.