Xaviant defends The Culling's monetisation

A few days ago we reported on the new monetisation model of The Culling, which was met with great criticism from fans. To summarize; developer Xaviant offers the multiplayer game for cheap in order to attract many players to the servers but they are supposed to pay for their matches individually. Only one game per day may be played for free, while the winners receive a token for another round. The losers either have to stop playing or secure tokens via microtransaction (or subscribe right away).

After the fans expressed their great displeasure about this model, Xaviant turned to PC Gamer to give them further insights into the topic. From this interview, we learn which changes the developers want to make and how this decision came to be in the first place.

Josh Van Veld, the director of operations at Xaviant, realizes that the communication was not good enough, but he defends the studio's idea. He mentions immense expenses incurred by the team when the game was previously released in the free-to-play format. According to the dev "millions of players" have flooded the servers at the time, but they did not spend anything on the cosmetic microtransactions which costs Xaviant " tens of thousands of dollars a month".

Therefore, the Culling is currently planning a secure financing route, although the great excitement will lead to concrete changes. Van Veld mentioned that players can prepare to play up to ten matches a day for free. Only then will the already established token system take over and ask all those who want to continue to play to checkout. Other than that, there were no further plans shared for the future, but Xaviant hopes that people understand and support them nevertheless.