Evolve is finally dying. Development has ended on Evolve Stage 2 , the free-to-play version of the game, before it even had the opportunity to come to consoles. Turtle Rock Studios is off of the game completely. I’ve seen brand new, sealed copies of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game at my local Goodwills for between $2.99 and $4.99. I think we can all say this one crashed and burned magnificently. But is history going to repeat itself? Are other companies going to keep making the same mistakes?
In some ways, it seems like companies may already be learning. Evolve was a multiplayer-centric adventure. You really had to have four other people with you so you could have a full party of four facing off against a single, human-controlled monster. There wasn’t much motivation to play otherwise. We haven’t seen any other companies go with this sort of gameplay motivation since, which is a sign that developers are learning. Especially since we’re seeing other previously-multiplayer games getting single player experiences. Titanfall 2 offers one, after Titanfall didn’t. Friday the 13th: The Game , previously a multiplayer-only affair, is going to have a single-player experience now. These are both signs that the same old mistakes aren’t being made.
Evolve was also overloaded with DLC, much of it things that should have been included in the base game or offered up for free. There were hunters, skins, and monsters a-plenty. It was too much and too expensive. There wasn’t enough moderation. It seems like companies are and aren’t getting the message here. I mean, most other developers are pretty wise about what they do and don’t charge for, but then we have The Coalition and Microsoft laying it on thick with Gears of War 4’ s Elite Packs. Of course, in their defense, those items are entirely optional and don’t add extra gameplay experiences not offered in the full game. So maybe this is a front where people will at least try to do the right thing.
There’s another area in which the same mistake is already being made again, and it’s from the same publisher even. So, Evolve is a game that should have been free-to-play from the start. With all the extraneous paid add-ons, Turtle Rock and 2K should have made the base available for free, perhaps with one of each kind of hunter and around two monsters, and then let people buy the rest if they wanted it. It did go freemium, but over a year after its release. It was too late. And now, it seems like 2K is making the same mistake with Battleborn . Battleborn isn’t doing well. By this time next year, it’ll probably be dead. Since Gearbox seems determined not to go free-to-play, it’s going to be Evolve all over again.
We’ll have to wait and see if the final thing that killed Evolve goes on to kill other current, promising games. 2K killed support and took Turtle Rock off of Evolve Stage 2 before anything really new and different could be done with it. I doubt we’ll ever see it on consoles. Only time will tell if this happens with more games from 2K or other publishers. Given how quickly companies are willing to stop supporting games that aren’t performing, it probably will happen again.
Evolve ended up being quite a mess. It’s a game that had promise. Had it been better handled, it could have been huge. I mean, if it had launched as a free-to-play game with more reasonable DLC expectations and releases, with proper support that staggered new maps, monsters, characters, and events, things might have been different. It may have been alive and popular for a year or longer. But all of the design decisions made by Turtle Rock Studios and 2K Games killed it. All we can hope is that people see this and try to do better.