The developer of the indie space game Evolvation initially aimed to block illegally resold keys. However, with this click, he triggered a chain reaction.
What is Evolvation? Evolvation is a space arena shooter with spaceships. The indie game has been hardly known on Steam so far. Therefore, one of the developers released a batch of Steam keys to attract players. Unfortunately, these keys were illegally resold by some individuals.
What did the developer do? This redistribution did not sit well with the developer. He decided to block them outright. However, he did not handle it particularly well. Instead of just blocking the illegally redistributed keys, he also blocked many legally purchased access codes.
Honest customers lash out: What happened next was not surprising. Many players were suddenly excluded from the game and vented their anger on Steam. Some even referred to the developer as a “money-hungry monkey”.
Game goes free2play and crashes
How did the developer want to make amends? Meanwhile, the developer was trying to mitigate the damage, as the bad publicity could otherwise be the death of his game. However, Steam could and would not reverse the key blocking.
Instead, they recommended the developer to offer his game for free for the time being until he could devise a better solution.
Players flood the servers: What happened next, however, was unexpected. The news about the free game spread virally and many curious players downloaded it. As a result, Evolvation suddenly reached a peak of 172,870 players online at the same time!
This brought the servers to their knees, which were never designed for such an onslaught. There were massive lags, ships were not loading from the database, and many players could not even enter the game.
The game is still in danger: Therefore, the developer now has to upgrade the servers and hopes that the players will remain loyal to him. Unfortunately, the game was never designed for a free2play model and contains no monetization options. So the developer is slowly running out of money and is currently not earning a cent from the game.
One can only hope that Evolvation manages to turn things around and survives this crisis.
