Ubisoft’s forgotten battle royale Hyper Scape will shut down in April

Remember Hyper Scape? You’ll probably need a moment to dredge up the memory. Ubisoft’s battle royale was unveiled back in July of 2020, and for a short while it seemed to have good momentum. A lot of content creators were playing the multiplayer shooter, and it looked as if Ubisoft  had a new hit on its hands. But it didn’t take long before interest fell off, either due to lack of support or other reasons. Eventually, its creator stopped officially supporting it last year. Hyper Scape has lingered on, but it won’t for much longer — the game will shut down for good this April.

Ubisoft quietly made the announcement earlier today. As of this writing, the news of Hyper Scape‘s eventual shuttering didn’t even make the company’s Twitter news cycle. That’s rough. As posted by the Hyper Scape team, the game will shut down on April 28. It’s kind of a sad ending for the colorful, bombastic battle royale. But in a sea of other games in the genre, something will have to get squeezed out. It might not be a total loss, as the team plans on using what was learned for the future.

“We have made the difficult decision to end development of Hyper Scape and shut the game down as of April 28th,” writes the team on the game’s website. “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.”

From lofty heights to a freefall

The team behind Hyper Scape attempted to bring the popular genre to literal new heights. Its city map was massive, and the tall buildings fostered vertical mobility and high-flying action. Hyper Scape got several seasons over the course of a year, and was eventually supported by cross-play. But the population clearly wasn’t increasing, and on April 6, 2021 it received a patch for v3.1. Following that, its website went quiet.

According to players on the game’s subreddit, there are still people joining queues. However, as of this week, Reddit user MotionGamingYT claims that there are only “15-25 people a match.” The game was designed to host 100 players per game.

“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,” writes the developer team. “Your devotion to the game we built will always be cherished.”