After a rocky year and a half, Turtle Rock Studios announced tonight they will be ending support for Evolve. The news comes only three months after the multiplayer shooter made the jump to free-to-play on the PC.
In a post on the Evolve message board, Turtle Rock Studios co-founders Phil Robb and Chris Ashton discussed why support is ending, and how it was not necessarily their own decision.
This is the life of AAA game developers who aren’t self-funded and don’t own their own IP. We don’t get to make the call. We all know that going in but we still sign the dotted line because we love what we do. We are happy to have gotten the opportunity to do something risky, something new and innovative. We created a brand new Sci-Fi world. We got to go to planet Shear and interact with alien flora and fauna. We got to hunt down, trap and kill giant monsters together. We got to BE the monster. What an awesome experience.
2K Games acquired the publishing rights for the title after THQ went under in 2012. The publisher were also the ones who decided that going free-to-play with Evolve: Stage 2 was the best strategy going forward. The move actually helped significantly raise the player count in the weeks following, but it appears the improvements did not satisfy 2K. Turtle Rock Studios still intended to bring the F2P version of the title to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but “it was just not meant to be” according to them.
While support for the game may be ending, the servers for Evolve: Stage 2 will remain online. 2K Games has not clarified whether the servers for the console version of the shooter will also remain online, but for those that still play the title, hopefully they will. Fans can catch one final livestream this Thursday over at the gae’s Twitch page.
Despite a plethora of pre-release buzz, Evolve just never managed to get off the ground. The 4v1 action failed to excite most gamers, and the constant stream of paid DLC was a major turn-off. I was hoping that the F2P model would work for the studio, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
Our thoughts go out to those at Turtle Rock Studios who may be affected by this news.