As Evolve goes to Free-to-Play, player count jumps up to 24K!

Before it’s release Evolve was garnering a lot of critical praise and upon release it had a tremendous fan reception. That didn’t seem to last very long however because the party seemed to die down and the honeymoon phase fizzled.

So what happened?

It’s hard to possibly pinpoint and I’m sure we could all speculate but with so much competition in the first-person shooter genre there could be a multitude of reasons why fans lost interest.    

One could say that Turtle Rock Studios had a unique concept with it’s 5 player, 4 hunters Vs. one monster system but one thing was clear something needed to be done to get fans interested again.

There were some in the gaming community that thought maybe Evolve should become a Free-to-play title because the gameplay could lend itself to that style and format. It would seem that the team at Turtle Rock agreed and the community will finally get what it wants with Evolve now becoming Evolve stage 2.

Since going to a free-to-play format yesterday the Evolve PC community jumped from a 157 user count to an astounding 24,000 active users, which marks a massive jump for the game in a very good way.  But it hasn’t been all lovely smelling roses however with the PC community having some complaints about this “re-beta” for the game, mostly in regards to it’s servers.

“This is going to allow us to hit our new server infrastructure really hard and we need your help testing. Stuff could break, and that’s our hope, because that will give us time to improve things as we go”, according to studio co-founders Chris Ashton & Phil Robb on the Turtle Rock Studios forums. So it sounds like things will begin to smooth out and become more stable as time goes on.

Evolve Stage 2 is currently available on steam for free. Players that bought the game at the premium prior to the switch to free-to-play, will receive what is known as ”Founder Status”. This will get those players extra gifts, rewards, and first access to any new changes the game will have . As for any purchased DLC this will transfer over to the new game and format at no additional cost.

Only time will tell if this change will keep Evolve Stage 2 in the forefront of gamers minds but for now it seems like a positive change to give this game the extra life it needed.