Turtle Rock Studios, the developer behind Evolve, has announced that they’ve ended support for the game – just a few months after going free-to-play on PC. Although Turtle Rock is done with Evolve, publisher 2K will keep the servers online for the foreseeable future and “everything regarding the console version of Evolve remains the same.”
The F2P version of Evolve, aka Stage 2, was supposed to be on the way for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but as 2K explains in their blog post, the focus is now on adding more PC players:
Evolve Stage 2 will continue to be free-to-play on PC and players can expect the in-game experience to remain the same, as we continue to experiment with the business model. We’ll also continue to evaluate the possibility of bringing the Stage 2 experience to consoles in the future, though right now our focus is on bringing in new players and maintaining the game’s audience on PC.
In a letter from Turtle Rock Co-Founders Chris Ashton and Phil Robb, they made it seem as though Stage 2 isn’t coming to consoles. “There’s a lot that we really wish we could have done, especially taking Stage 2 to consoles, but it looks like that’s just not meant to be,” they said.
Elsewhere in the letter, Ashton and Robb said the decision to stop working on Evolve wasn’t up to them:
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.
They went on to thank the people at THQ who initially believed in them, 2K for “picking up the mantle out of THQ’s bankruptcy and making Evolve one of the most anticipated games of 2015,” and 2K once again for taking a AAA game free-to-play.
With 2K saying they’ve taken “the operation of the Evolve franchise fully in-house,” Turtle Rock revealed that this isn’t the end for them. “Those of you who’ve followed Turtle Rock Studios, this is not goodbye,” they said. “We have lots of stuff in the works that we hope you’ll enjoy but we are departing on the Laurie-Anne for the last time and must bid a farewell to the planet Shear.”
[Source: 2K Blog, Turtle Rock Studios]
