Turtle Rock Studios’ asymmetrical multiplayer game Evolve has always had a tough time attracting players. After rough sales, 2K Games turned to a free-to-play model on PC in order to get newcomers invested in the game. Now, Turtle Rock co-founders Phil Robb and Chris Ashton have revealed that Evolve‘s development has been effectively handled over to publisher 2K Games, who currently has no plans on bringing additional content to the game.
Originally, Turtle Rock Studios was working with 2K on Evolve: Stage 2, a free-to-play content move planned for both PC and consoles. Evolve made the switch on PC earlier this year, but the game is still for sale on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. And while the studio planned to tackle this and bring Stage 2 over to PS4 and Xbox users, 2K is now in charge of any future development plans. And the publisher doesn’t seem interested in expanding Stage 2 beyond PC anytime soon.
“2K will continue to evaluate the possibility of bringing Evolve Stage 2 to console, but maintaining and growing the game’s audience on PC is the primary focus,” 2K wrote.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Evolve is dead. As 2K stated, “Evolve: Stage 2 servers will remain online for the foreseeable future.” But it does mean that the game will no longer see major updates, new content and will largely run on the current executable version of the game.
“This is the life of AAA game developers who aren’t self-funded and don’t own their own IP,” Robb and Ashton told fans in their blog post. “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.”
Evolve might have had a troubled history, but it’s sad to see the game is effectively coming to a close. After all, with no future content or updates planned at the moment, Evolve is effectively complete. But will 2K’s plans effectively kill the game’s player base? Time will tell whether the game holds onto its current players as the community reacts to the news.
