End of Back 4 Blood; Devs Turn to New Game
Turtle Rock has announced the end of development of the shooter Back 4 Blood. The team is already working on a new game.
We have bad news for fans of Back 4 Blood, the co-op shooter by Turtle Rock. The developers have announced that the game will not be further supported.
- Back 4 Blood will continue to operate. Servers will remain active, and the game is still expected to be available for purchase and as part of Game Pass and PS Plus services. We just shouldn't count on any new content.
- Turtle Rock explains that it is a small team for working on AAA games. The developers have already started work on the next game and are unable to create it while supporting Back 4 Blood.
- Abandoning the game less than 15 months after its release shows that it has done worse than expected.
Recall that Back 4 Blood debuted in October 2021. The game is available on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PlayStation 5, and upon release the game received three DLCs (Tunnels of Terror, Children of the Worm and River of Blood) and as you can see, these will have to suffice.
The abandonment of the project is disappointing, but not surprising. The game debuted strongly, but then its popularity steadily declined. This can be well seen from the activity results on Steam - yesterday, at the hottest moment of the day, the title was played by 3374 concurrent players. This is more than ten times less than yesterday's record for Left 4 Dead 2. Back 4 Blood was supposed to be the successor of the L4D series (Turtle Rock, under a different name, developed the first part of the series, by the way), but the project failed to convince enough gamers for its development to continue.
It is worth recalling that this is not the first such failure of the team. Their previous game, i.e. Evolve, was also a flop. The developers later tried to save the game by switching it to free-to-play model, but their efforts were in vain.
