The battle royale market is saturated, it's undeniable. Yet when Ubisoft launched its futuristic free-to-play battle royale Hyper Scape in 2020 it seemed like a likely success. With Ubisoft's backing, Hyper Scape had an opportunity to thrive by consistently releasing updates and new content. Yet Hyper Scape immediately struggled and was broadly criticized. Since then, the battle royale hasn't recovered. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Ubisoft has now announced that Hyper Scape's development is ending, and that servers will be shutting down.The announcement was shared on social media Thursday morning in a blog post titled "A message regarding the future of Hyper Scape." The post itself is short and to the point. The development team tells Hyper Scape Contenders that it has made the decision to end further development of Hyper Scape. The team tells players that it's extremely grateful to them for joining in on "our journey" and that it plans to take what it's learned from Hyper Scape on to future projects.The Hyper Scape servers won't be shutting down immediately, however. Ubisoft will be leaving servers open for some time yet, to allow players one last hoorah in the battle royale. The official shutdown date for Hyper Scape's servers will be April 28, three months from now. While the servers closing down at all is obviously a frustrating and disappointing decision, particularly with regards to preservation and archival, Ubisoft could have simply shut the servers down immediately and is instead giving players a not insignificant amount of time with the game.
Ubisoft does also thank players for their "passion and dedication" to Hyper Scape while development remained active. The Ubisoft developers say that players' devotion to Hyper Scape will "always be cherished," a heartfelt message from a team having to say goodbye to a game that its spent years of work on.
The writing has been on the wall for Hyper Scape for some time, as the battle royale's community has been deeply aware. The last message shared by Hyper Scape on its Twitter account is dated June 30 and it highlights an official Hyper Scape comic published by Dark Horse. The last game update, from Hyper Scape Season 3, is from April 2021 and largely focused on fixes and smaller updates.
Ubisoft, by all appearances, pulled the plug on Hyper Scape in mid-2021. For players, today's announcement is simply a confirmation that the lights are ready to be turned off. The battle royale market isn't easy to enter into anymore, as even Ubisoft couldn't manage it. But the true loss of the day is for Hyper Scape players who have loved the game and will soon be without it.
Hyper Scape is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
