author: Paul Wozniak
Evolve. 8 online games that rapidly lost players
Table of Contents
- Release date: 10 February 2015
- What didn't work out: poor business model at launch and gameplay that got boring too quickly
- Current status: no support and servers disabled
What are we talking about here?
Evolve, released in 2015, is a cooperative shooter in which four players become monster hunters to hunt a beast, played by the fifth player. The rules of the game were quite simple - the team had to track down the monster and take it down. However, the person playing as the monster was forced to wait safely for the beginning of the game, grow in strength and then eliminate opponents. The game was developed by the creators of the Left 4 Dead series. It should be noted here that Evolve was originally released in a buy-to-play model, to then move to free-to-play and function as Evolve Stage Two.
What went wrong?
On paper, Evolve was a very good game. The idea excited players and the developers' experience was optimistic. What's more, the game received pretty good ratings from industry journalists, which shows how difficult it was to predict such a spectacular failure. The first problem of Evolve was the game's business model - the title was available at the price of the top AAA game, but that didn't mean that we could fully enjoy the game right away. On the day of the premiere, additional content could be purchased (e.g. additional monsters and character classes), thus the players who have already spent their money on the title were simply not happy with that. Eventually, this led to Evolve switching to free-to-play in 2016, although this did not solve the problems that afflicted the title.
Although the new business model initially attracted a lot of players, they were very quickly abandoning production. The reason for this was simply a very small variety of gameplay mechanics, which made the game boring quite quickly. Players also complained about the ill-considered rules of play, which made playing without a pack of friends extremely cumbersome, and most of the matches ended with tedious running around the map in search of the monster hiding most of the time. The problem was also poor balance of available characters.
WHERE DID EVOLVE WIND UP?
Already in 2016, the creators of Evolve announced that they will stop working on the game, and in 2018 free to play servers were shut down. Players who have purchased the title can still play in several multiplayer variants.
