2K and Turtle Rock Studios have decided to make Evolve free to play as the Evolve Stage 2 beta for PC gamers through Steam and the number of players have skyrocketed.
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However, when you make a downloaded game free that originally costed money, you run the risk of angering your audience who paid money to play it. On a discussion page about Evolve On Steam several players said things like “It doesn’t feel like Evolve”, or “They took out a bunch of stuff”.
The sudden jump was pretty surprising. PC Gamer reports that Evolve had a peak player count of 157 on July 6th, which was the day before the game went free-to-play. As of Saturday, its player count has risen over 25,000% and is now the top 11 most played game on Steam.
However, the performance of the game is still to be observed, especially in terms of how the title can maintain such numbers.
As of right now, over 20k are playing Turtle Rock Studios’ asymmetrical monster-hunting shooter and it’s today’s 17th most played game on Steam.
Evolve’s experience has the potential to get better considering the game is now back in beta as the team puzzle out how to make the game work as free to play.
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According to Gamespot, what you will receive when you download the game is five Modes, 19 maps, four classes for a total of 18 hunters and four monsters, which includes the August 2015 update that added an extra trapper and game map. Free-to-play has eliminated the barrier to entry in terms of cost, but after that the onus is pretty much on the developer to ensure that the game is compelling enough to keep gamers around. The hunters’ mission is to search for the monster in a given amount of time while the monster’s goal is to evolve and develop their powerful skills.
