Turtle Rock Studios has announced that Evolve has become free-to-play as of today. According to the announcement made on the studio’s forums, anyone who purchased Evolve in the past will have Founder status, which allows players to keep all of their progress in addition to other rewards.
The announcement was released in conjunction with a post by Chris Ashton and Phil Robb, the co-founders of Turtle Rock Studios.
“When people first started playing Evolve at those and other conferences, it was magical. Sure, there was the AAA videogame hype surrounding our title. Yeah, we also had the flashy displays, the giant Goliath statue, and all the other things AAA games do to get people excited. And that stuff was cool. Really cool. But, what we lived for — what was cooler by far — was just seeing people play Evolve for the first time… Then, when Evolve launched, the reception wasn’t what we expected. Sure, there were some good reviews. There were also bad reviews. Yes, there was excitement. There was also disappointment – for players and for us. The DLC s***storm hit full force and washed away people’s enthusiasm, dragging us further and further from that first magical pick-up-and-play experience…”
The DLC backlash they refer to was the $136 worth of content that launched with the game itself as paid DLC in addition to a season pass for future DLC. While Day One DLC is becoming an increasingly common trend, Evolve’s sheer mass of DLC outraged many players, who argued that some of the content should have been a part of the main game. The developers have explained in the past that most of the DLC is cosmetic. TotalBiscuit covered the DLC scandal in depth in this video, which goes over the consumer reactions to DLC and how such DLC is made.
Evolve, an asymmetrical multiplayer shooter that pit four hunters against one titanic monster, was Turtle Rock Studios’ followup to their smash hit multiplayer game Left 4 Dead, the rights to which now belong to Valve.
