Ubisoft battle royale game Hyper Scape is shutting down

If you’re a fan of Hyper Scape, the Ubisoft battle royale title that launched in 2020, we have some bad news for you: Ubisoft has announced the game will soon shut down. While that probably won’t come as a surprise to current and former players, we now have confirmation from Ubisoft along with a concrete shutdown date. As it turns out, Hyper Scape fans only have a few more months before the game disappears for good.

Ubisoft

In an update on its website today, Ubisoft revealed Hyper Scape will shut down in April 2022. “We have made the difficult decision to end development of Hyper Scape and shut the game down as of April 28th,” the blog post explains. “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.”

Ubisoft proceeds to thank the Hyper Scape community for its “passion and dedication” to the game in its brief statement. This isn’t a particularly shocking announcement, as the battle royale game ultimately felt more like a flash in the pan rather than a long-lasting hit.

Indeed, the writing was already on the wall in some regards. If you look at the news section on the Hyper Scape website, the last news post before this announcement was published nine months ago in April 2021. That post covered patch notes for the last major update Hyper Scape received and, considering the game was less than a year old at that point, the silence from Ubisoft probably in the months that followed said it all.

What went wrong? It was probably a number of factors. While Hyper Scape did have some intriguing aspects to it, the game was a latecomer to the battle royale space. By the time Ubisoft launched Hyper Scape in 2020, the giants of the battle royale genre like Fortnite and Apex Legends were already well established.

Not only was Ubisoft going up against established titans, but it also launched Hyper Scape into a crowded space. While the battle royale frenzy seems to have calmed down, there was a period of time when everyone was trying to launch titles in the genre. For games to succeed in a crowded market like that, they have to really stand out from the competition, and Hyper Scape didn’t manage to do that.

In the end, it was a matter of “too little, too late” for Ubisoft and the battle royale title. Though the company says some aspects of this game will live on in its future titles, Hyper Scape itself is nearing the end of the road. Look for the game servers to shut down permanently on April 28, 2022.