The developers of DriveClub, Evolution Studios, are laying off roughly half of their staff (55 employees). Apparently the long promised and almost forgotten PS Plus Edition is still in the plans, but a sequel for DriveClub is probably not in the pipeline. Eurogamer has received the following statement from Sony.

Evolution Studios will now focus on DriveClub as a service going forward, in particular, the important launch of the PS Plus Edition. We will be restructuring Evolution Studios to ensure that SCE WWS and in particular, Evolution Studios are in the best position to achieve these goals.

Our first party development studios are key to our creative strategy and we are very excited about the future projects being worked on and the role Evolution Studios will play.

We will be looking to relocate team members throughout the studios, but unfortunately some redundancies will be necessary and in those cases we will assist staff in any way we can.

I'm frankly quite surprised by this. I know DriveClub had a lot of issues and may not be a good game, but it seemed to sell relatively well.

I'm not. They delayed what was supposed to be a PS4 launch game, twice, and it came out almost a full year late. And when they actually released this online-centric driving game, the online component didn't work. Nor did the game feature the promised weather effects, nor was there a PS Plus version made available. They patched in the weather a few months later, but the PS Plus edition still doesn't fucking exist, arguably because they're trying to dupe people into just buying it without trying it because they know the game isn't very good. Not just for being delayed/incomplete/broken, the actual game that was there had laughably bad handling/physics. Driveclub's only redeeming quality is that it looks pretty. If I sound upset about it, I am, because that was the game I was hoping would be great and would push me to buy a PS4. It turned out to be a complete disaster, and though I don't like seeing it happen, people deserved to lose their jobs over Driveclub.

I'm sad for those out of work but it did appear that this game was a giant mess. The buzz around the game started positive but went downhill quite quickly.

I think that the only reason that stopped Sony from completely shutting the studio down is the faint hope that evolution might somehow come up with another successful title like Motor Storm.

Man.. If only they had more faith in liverpool *sniff* *sniff*

Driveclub turned out really enjoyable for me.

They made some AI adjustments, fixed online and introduced some really cool features and free DLC.

It's easily the best looking game on PS4/Xbox1.

They did good by their community in the right way, which is fine by me. I still play it once a week or so.

This business is just brutal.

Yeah, it's enough to make me relieved that I didn't actually follow my childhood dreams and go into game dev (I went into normal software dev, instead). The idea of working in such a hit-based business where you work heavy crunch and then can almost immediately find yourself out on your ass if your latest game doesn't succeed (or even if it does!) sounds incredibly stressful.

Condolences to the people there, and I hope they all land on their feet.

I know I should be sad about such news, and really I should be; the industry is a very tough, unfair business, and learning people who put their heart and soul into such work will lose their job is always tragic. But here's the thing... if there is any developer who deserves a giant slap in the face on my part for their incompetence, it is Evolution Studios.

I'm not even talking about Driveclub! I mean it was broken at launch and everything, but now it looks like a decent GRID-like racing game and that's fine. No, I'm talking about MotorStorm. I'm talking about one of the most promising racing game series of the last generation, with the first game being one of my favorite games of all-time, being squandered by idiotic design decisions game after game. And yet I stuck to it! I played every game in the series, except Arctic Edge, hoping to see the improvements MotorStorm deserved, and it's only after hours of playing Apocalypse, of constantly fighting the geometry that I realized... maybe that series wasn't very good.

MotorStorm was filed with promise. The tracks were few, but they were all amazingly designed. The art direction was colorful, massive, made me wonder about the festival beyond the track. The music fit right it. The racing was streamlined, simple, easy to understand. The single-player made you learn each and every vehicle type. Even the loading screens had personality with small tips exclusive to each and every race. And yet Evolution Studios evolved the series in all the wrong directions possibles! It could have been the WipEout of its generation, now it is just lost in the dust of what could have been.

That is really rough. I wonder what their plan is now considering they just lost about half their staff.

I'm not surprised to see this and won't be when layoffs hit Ready at Dawn. If your game doesn't do well financially or critically you'll have to cut jobs to save costs. It's not a wonder why there are so many re-releases of not so old games. There'll be more coming.

@probablytuna: DriveClub was by no means a critical success, but it did sell very well at launch and through the bundles.

Then again if we believe what "DriveClub guy" said a the PS4 reveal, DriveClub took a very long time to develop and may thus have been prohibitively expensive.

It's kinda frightening to see even the biggest studios appear to always be just one misstep away from collapse.

Please. Stop.

I was doing some thinking about what the remaining Evolution staff will be doing. I figure they will be tasked with cranking out some DLC and then dismissed, or perhaps some of them will be offered positions at other Sony studios.

No?

I deleted it the other day. The AI's not suited to narrow tracks and I still can't get on with the handling. 55GBs freed up on my hard drive.

@mb: One idea I had was that Evolution Studios could be turned into a DLC house for GranTurismo.

@mb: They've said elsewhere that the rest of the crew will stay on as maintenance, so releasing the DLC (the bulk of which is probably done) and tuning up any more issues. And perhaps maybe actually finally releasing that PS+ version of the game.

This PS+ Version stuff makes no sense. How can full game be completed in two years, then take an additional two years to make the demo disk version that is the full gigabyte download of the game with just blocks on what you unlock?

I know 90's demo discs took some effort, because there wasn't enough room on one CD, so dev had to figure how to make one chapter run independently without the triggers that would start and end it.

But an entire studio needs this long to program essentially an on-disc-DLC setup, which nearly all racing games already do. Weird.

It'd be like Konami promising a Tanker only version of MGS2 for download, with an option to upgrade to the full game, but taking years after the game was already in stores to complete it.

@rachelepithet: The issue with the demo version seemed to be that their servers are held together with bubblegum and they're afraid to turn on the demo because once they do everyone with a PS4 and PS+ sub can now connect to those servers and probably crash them down again.

@rachelepithet: My understanding is that it's a server issue. The majority of problems DriveClub had at launch had to do with servers getting overwhelmed. That being said, I don't quite understand why/how Sony hasn't just thrown a ton of servers at the problem.

At this point the PS+ version seems like something Sony has to deliver on before E3, unless they want to continue have the whole thing haunting them. It's not actually such a big deal, I mean I'm not sure if Id even play it if it came out, but the negative press around the matter is something the company surely doesn't need.