At this point we no longer look at Evolve as a team-based, monster-hunting FPS, but rather as a free to play experiment.

When Evolve was first released it was sold at full price and it banked the lion’s share on its multiplayer mode.

For a variety of reasons players began leaving the game and its servers soon became barren. To combat this, developer Turtle Rock Studios decided to turn it into a free to play (F2P) game that anyone could download from Steam. Those who had forked out money for the game on its initial release were given in-game currency and unlocks as compensation. Oh, and for some reason, the game was renamed Evolve Stage 2.

Initially, the plan seemed to work as the game saw almost an 8 000% percent increase in players. But, as many online had said, the real test would come months after this initial craze died down. Would Evolve Stage 2 be able to hang onto its new players?

Well, we’ve been tracking it for three months now and we have more numbers to share with you.

October hasn’t been a banner month for the game, but the steady decline we saw in September has leveled off to around 3 000 or less concurrent players.

The numbers we’ve been looking at all this time stem from the peak number of players on July 6th at 21:20 – a day before it became free to play. The other numbers listed below are from the same time of day a month apart:

Date Number of players July 6th 155 July 7th 12 140 August 7th 8 873 September 7th 2 515 October 7th 2 162

Now we realise that we’re not mathematicians and our numbers may be wrong, but looking at the graphs provided by unoffical source Steamdb it’s clear that the game may have hit a plateau.

We’ll keep on checking in on this strange beast of a game periodically to see what it and its players are up to. Regardless of it being a success or a failure, it will surely be a model for similar struggling, multiplayer-focused games.