One month ago Evolve made the bold move to make the jump from full-price game to free to play, and it worked out well.

The new version of the game, now titled Evolve Stage 2, increased its playerbase an astounding 7 732%.

On July 6th the original Evolve boasted 155 people playing simultaneously. As a game dependant on having a large amount of players online at once, this was an indication of a dead game. The very next day, after developers Turtle Rock announced that the game would be free, that number shot up to 12 140.

These impressive numbers were tempered by many people assuming that this was just an initial flood of new, interested players that would presumably leave once they had a chance to look around and kick the tires.

What would be more indicative of the game’s future, it was postulated, would be looking at the numbers again at a later stage, and that’s what we’ve done.

Looking at the same times we’ve been using, 21:20 at night (as this was the peak count at the time of writing the original story), Steamdb reports that 8 873 were playing the game on August 7 2016, one month after Evolve became free to play.

As always, these numbers come with caveats. Steamdb is not affiliated with Valve, Steam’s owners, so the the numbers are unofficial.

It must also be noted that Turtle Rock has kept interest in the game alive with the “Shear Madness” event which will be adding five updates over five weeks.

And, looking at other sources, the news continues to look good for the game. SteamCharts reports an average of 16 984 players in the last 30 days.

Again we’ll need to put this game to the back of our minds and return in the future to see how its faring. If we could only use a Magic 8 Ball to sum up this story, then we’d have to say “outlook good”.