The monster game Evolve is back – at least a little bit. The servers have been reactivated. What is behind it?
Evolve was one of the great pioneers of the asymmetric gaming genre, with a really great idea: Four hunters fight against an overwhelmingly powerful monster and must bring it to its knees. Both hunters and monsters are played by people; NPCs were basically not intended. On the one hand, this fulfilled the grand power fantasy of an overpowering beast, and on the other hand, it delivered the exhilarating feeling of being able to defeat a far too strong enemy as a team.
However, Evolve died an inglorious death, shutting down the servers at the end of 2018. But now the game is being played again. What’s going on?
What happened to Evolve? Evolve launched as a promising AAA title but soon lost numerous players shortly after the launch. Slow updates and a botched DLC marketing campaign by the publisher quickly caused the game to fall out of favor. Even the hastily stitched switch to a “Free2Play” model could not save the game, and soon the lights went out.
But at least owners of Evolve could still play. Even though most servers were shut down, thanks to peer-to-peer connections, it was still possible to play with others. At least until a while ago.
It is not entirely clear what led to this, but a Steam update is suspected. However, for a while now, not even peer-to-peer connections were possible.
This caused buyers and fans to take to the barricades. On a Discord server with over 10,000 members, players coordinated, sent mails to the publisher 2K, and asked for the reactivation of the servers. This apparently bore fruit.
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This is how player numbers have developed: As reported by colleagues from GameStar, the Evolve servers are suddenly active again. The news of the reactivated servers has given Evolve a small but noticeable increase in players.
Whereas in previous months at most 43 people were online at the same time, this peak from the night of July 27 to July 28 even rose to a proud 828 players (via steamcharts.com). That is an increase of over 1,800%. The word that Evolve can be played again is still spreading, so it is quite possible that a few more players will join in the coming days.
How can you join? Currently, this is only possible if you already own Evolve, as the game has not been listed on Steam for a while. Only those who already have it in their library can access the monster game. Both versions currently work, both “Evolve Stage 2”, the Free2Play variant, and “Evolve Legacy”, the original version of the game, which can be downloaded via “Properties” and then “Betas” in the game library.
Some fans hope that Evolve will now generate enough buzz to land back in the Steam store and be relevant again. However, this hope should probably be taken with caution.
A fundamentally nice sign – because some have never fully recovered from the death of Evolve.
