Ubisoft's Hyper Scape will close all servers by April of this year

14 February 2022

Game developer Ubisoft has recently announced that it will stop any further development of its battle royal game Hyper Scape and that all servers will be shut down by April 28th. Hyper Scape was meant to be the company’s answer to hugely popular titles like PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Fortnite, but it never managed to really live up to the expectations and now the plug has been pulled.

No real impact on international esports

Battle royal games are some of the most popular games in international esports nowadays and Hyper Scape was still a relatively new addition to the space. Beta tests took place in July of 2020 and the full release followed just a month after that. Now, not even 18 months later, the game’s removal from Ubisoft’s portfolio has been announced. “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, wrote Ubisoft when announcing the end of Hyper Scape’s development, “We will be taking key learnings from this game into future products”.

On the one hand, for those people and gamers who closely follow the battle royal space in international esports, the announcement might come as a bit of a surprise. The future of Hyper Scape looked quite bright when it first launched back in the summer of 2020. The beta version of the game alone attracted more than half a million viewers on Twitch and the game’s official channel quickly reached over 200,000 followers. On the other hand, the reality is that Hyper Scape had not gotten an update since April 2021 and Ubisoft had been quiet until now about its plans for the game. Those are usually not considered positive signs for a game and some players will have taken them as hints at behind-the-scenes issues.

Is Ubisoft planning a new launch?

One thing that attentive followers of Ubisoft and Hyper Scape have noticed, is that the news of Hyper Scape’s closure was published around the same time that the developer started closed beta tests for their newest upcoming title, Ghost Recon: Frontline. Testing for this title started on January 30th and one possibility is that Ubisoft shut down an underperforming title like Hyper Scape to allocate more servers to Ghost Recon.

With Ghost Recon: Frontline, Ubisoft is staying in the battle royal universe, this time with a live-service first person massive multiplayer online PvP tactical shooter. The game will be free-to-play, and is said to be under development for PC, Playstation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Google Stadia, and Amazon Luna. The first reactions to the beta version of the game have largely been negative, mainly due to viewers and players accusing the game of being a copy of Call of Duty: Warzone, but Ubisoft seems set on continuing development and launch plans for now.