Just Survive — H1Z1’s original mode — is shutting down in October

Just Survive, the spinoff of H1Z1 that re-launched on Steam Early Access about a year ago, will be shut down at the end of October, Daybreak Games announced yesterday.

Servers for the survival MMO will be available until 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Oct. 24, Daybreak said. All Steam purchases and in-game transactions have already been disabled.

Daybreak called it a difficult decision to retire Just Survive but said “the current population of the game makes it untenable to maintain.”

Just Survive has a confusing lineage but it is effectively the original H1Z1, whose core mode put players on a large open-world map filled with zombies. Players fought for survival and resources against the undead as well as one another.

After the game launched in Early Access in January 2015, H1Z1 had two modes — including a battle royale developed with the help of Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene, the namesake of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Those modes were split into two separate games in 2016. H1Z1’s original mode became H1Z1: Just Survive.

That was renamed to Just Survive in a relaunch last August, which broke with the H1Z1 canon, leaving King of the Kill (the battle royale mode) to carry on that lore as the newly renamed H1Z1: Battle Royale, which is a free-to-play game that launched in early access on PS4 back in May. It’s still around on PC under that name, too, drawing an average concurrent audience of about 3,300 on that platform over the past month.

Just Survive, by contrast, hasn’t had more than 1,000 average concurrents in a month since January, and never surpassed the 2,000 it saw during its August 2017 relaunch.