After languishing in Early Access purgatory for seven long years, SCUM, the multiplayer survival title from Croatian developer Gamepires finally clawed its way to a full 1.0 release on June 18, 2025, ushering in a new era of open-world carnage and chaos.

Marketed as a gritty, player-driven survival sandbox where every interaction could spell your doom or salvation, SCUM’s long-awaited 1.0 release came with all the usual fanfare, refined mechanics, fresh content, and of course, a shiny new Deluxe Edition to milk players for more cash via pointless cosmetic fluff.

But instead of celebrating, a sizable chunk of the community, particularly Japanese and Korean players were blindsided. With no warning, no apology, and certainly no refunds, Gamepires and their new parent company in Jagex quietly scrubbed support for those languages in the launch patch.

Fitting, really because nothing says “SCUM” quite like gutting a portion of your own playerbase on release day.

When SCUM first hit Steam Early Access in August 2018, it launched with only three languages, English, German, and Russian yet still managed to carve out early success thanks to its multiplayer survival sandbox appeal.

Over the years, the game steadily broadened both its features and its accessibility.

By 2019, support had grown to include French, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese while Korean and Turkish lingual options were added by early 2020 followed up with the Japanese language rounding out the roster by November 2021 with SCUM now surmounting to a global player base that helped keep the title afloat during its long development.

As SCUM approached its long-awaited 1.0 release, it boasted support for thirteen languages, a sign of its global appeal. But now? That number’s quietly dropped to ten. Without so much as a warning or explanation, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish have been scrubbed from the game entirely, as if those players never mattered in the first place.

This wasn’t just some half-baked, superficial localization job either, SCUM had offered partial but fully usable Japanese and Korean translations for years. These translations made the game’s dense UI, complex systems, and menu navigation accessible to non-English-speaking players.

They weren’t a luxury; they were a necessity.

But with the official 1.0 launch, those languages were unceremoniously axed with no mention as to why in the patch notes, no heads-up, and certainly no refunds for players who bought the game expecting those languages to stick around as it left Early Access and entered full release.

Steam’s community forums are now flooded with confusion and outrage. Longtime players, especially in Japanese and Korean threads, are left shouting into the void, demanding to know why something so fundamental was ripped out after years of reliable inclusion.

Neither Gamepires nor Jagex who acquired the studio in 2022 after Devolver Digital and Croteam jumped ship back in 2019 have offered so much as a whisper about the move. No blog post, no tweet, not even a token PR statement to soften the blow. Just radio silence.

For a game that’s drifted in and out of relevance, reinvigorated only by the occasional massive patch drawing back its loyal niche and attracting new blood this total silence is a masterclass in burning goodwill to the ground.

Transparency isn’t some corporate buzzword; it’s survival fuel for indie multiplayer games like SCUM, where the entire experience hinges on community interaction. So why the radio silence?

As it stands, SCUM’s recent review score has dipped to Mixed, with just 60% of reviews in the past 30 days clocking in as positive. The 1.0 launch, far from a triumphant moment, has triggered a wave of backlash, much of it coming from foreign players who feel flat-out betrayed after being quietly abandoned by Gamepires without warning or compensation.

And here’s the real gut-punch: no refunds in sight. Japanese, Korean, and Turkish regions caught in the crossfire paid for a game advertised in their language, now they’re staring at menus they can’t even read. Pretending customers should magically become bilingual isn’t a hiccup; it’s a bait-and-switch so brazen it’d make a sleazy pawn-lot dealer blush.

Sure, management can hide behind the “small percentage of the playerbase” excuse, but percentages don’t justify sucker-punching the loyal fans who help bankrolled SCUM’s seven-year crawl out of Early Access. Gamepires’ radio silence only cements the impression they’re banking on players either swallowing the insult or just walking away.

The Japanese community isn’t taking this lying down. In classic DIY spirit, fans have already whipped up a translation mod, replacing the game’s “PLATFORM DEFAULT” English language with Japanese. It’s a bold middle finger to the developers’ apathy and a harsh reality check.

Players shouldn’t be the ones cleaning up the mess a studio made.

It’s a small act of defiance, but one that speaks volumes. Gamers will always care more about preserving a game’s soul than the companies cashing in on it. Gamepires might think Korean, Japanese and Turkish players are expendable, but gutting language support post-launch without a word?

That’s not just tone-deaf, it’s the kind of move that earns you the name SCUM in more ways than one.