Forgotten Shooter Returns; Player Pleas Brought Reactivation of Servers
2K Games has given gamers a pleasant surprise by reactivating the servers of online shooter Evolve Stage 2, which closed five years ago.
Quite unexpectedly, online shooter Evolve has experienced a small renaissance - all thanks to a group of stubborn fans, who did not give up even after the game was officially abandoned. They managed to convince the devs to reactivate the servers.
- Evolve debuted as a paid game. It failed, so the developers switched it to free-to-play model (this version were called Stage 2), which, however, was also unsuccessful.
- In 2018 Evolve Stage 2 servers were closed, and the game was pulled from distribution. Those who had previously purchased the original version (the so-called Legacy), however, could still play the pre-free-to-play edition. This required finding willing players on their own (mainly through Discord Evolve Reunited), as the gameplay took place in a peer-to-peer model.
- This is how players played Evolve Legacy for many years, but a few months ago a Steam update broke something and further gameplay became impossible.
- Fans began sending emails to the publisher, 2K Games, asking them to fix the problem. For a long time they received no response, but eventually the ability to play the Legacy version was restored.
- The most interesting thing is that 2K Games, encouraged by the devotion of fans on July 22, also restored the ability to play Evolve Stage 2 by reactivating the servers.
- The return of the free-to-play version resulted in a big increase in the game's popularity. In the weeks leading up to the event, records of the day on Steam were around 25-50 players playing simultaneously. After July 22, these numbers began to rise rapidly - yesterday, at the hottest time of the day Evolve on Steam was played by 853 concurrent users.
- Comeback of Evolve Stage 2 was also noticed on Twitch. On July 26, the game's broadcasts were watched by up to nearly 30,000 viewers at the same time.
Unfortunately, for now, all these attractions can only be enjoyed by those who owned the game before its servers were closed. However, fans are hopeful that they will be able to convince 2K Games to putEvolve Stage 2 back on sale on Steam and thus to enable new players to join the game.
