Turtle Rock is shutting down Evolve later this year

Still playing Evolve? Well, you only have a few more months to enjoy it before the embattled multiplayer shooter is taken off life support permanently later this year.

That’s right, 2K Games is shutting down dedicated servers and pulling Evolve’s free-to-play Stage 2 version from digital storefronts soon. Despite developer Turtle Rock’s efforts to reboot it with the Stage 2 update, the game has struggled to find an audience, not even making Steam’s top 100 games by concurrent users. Despite a brief revival following the update, Evolve never quite recovered from its troubled launch, and in 2016 Turtle Rock stated that it would no longer be working on the game.

After dedicated servers are taken down, the game will still be playable online via the peer-to-peer multiplayer in Legacy Evolve on PC and console. Any of the game’s many, many DLC packs that players have bought will still be usable as well.

Whilst it is disappointing to see Evolve meet such an ignoble end, it really goes to show how important first impressions are. Evolve initially launched with a highly aggressive DLC and Season Pass campaign which included various preorder bonuses, alienating players who considered the vanilla package to be light on content. Evolve’s Stage 2 update for PC players, which made the game free to play and unlocked all monster classes for all players, gave the game a small uptick in player numbers, but was ultimately not enough to save a game that most players had given up on.

The Stage 2 version of the game will be removed from digital storefronts on the 2nd of July, and the dedicated servers will shut down on 3rd September 2018.