I've been travelling the entire summer and finally got back to my PS4. Wanted to play a game or two and no luck with Matchmaking. What happened?

The speed with which its playerbase disappeared was a major story within a month of its release, I feel like.

I had all my fun with in during the first month and haven't gone back. Not a comment on the quality of the game, I really enjoyed that time, but I felt like I had my fill. I bet a lot of people felt the same way.

It was almost empty a month after release.

when it was announced

boom rekt

As soon as people would drop or fuck around after one early mistake which was about a week or so in. I stopped playing when I had 4 or so monsters in a row just go hide in a bush or corner AFK after an early mess up.

Seemed like people were ready to hate it from the start so that didnt help. Maybe being f2p would have at least kept their numbers boosted (though not sure how economically viable).

Seems really sad to think that they were at one point very heavily marketing it as 'the next big esport'.

Through natural selection it evolved into a game with no players.

I think they really rubbed people the wrong way with how much advertising they did on literally every site on the internet. I Hadn't played it myself but it seemed like at launch people were already like, "yep that's a totally fine game that I dont want to play ever again"

well that was just stupid.

Buy the PC MONSTER RACE™ edition of EVOLVE™ for additional players

Game looked boring, game was boring, players stop playing.

I played the alpha and knew it wasn't for me, the hunters just seemed boreing as half the time is spent running around not doing much chaseing the monster and as the monster i just didn't like the feel of the controls.

The marketing department killed the game just before release. I played the alpha and was looking forward to it, then all the convoluted DLC stuff happened with multiple versions and packs.

I ended up glad I never bothered, as well as my friends I was going to play it with. I bet many are in the same boat, which is a shame because it was pretty fun.

Such a shame. I really enjoyed what I played but now there's no one around. Gonna delete it off my PS4.

A perfect example of how a game being esports grade is determined by consumers, not publishers.

Before it even came out. The Youtuber hate train was all over this in the months leading up to release. Okay, yeah, it had an audience for a while after it came out, but the vast majority of multiplayer game playerbases taper off heavily in the months following release and since this game never really had a fair shot to begin with, the initial playerbse was at best middling which meant it was always going to die off pretty hard and fast.

Right out of the gate.

Yeah, why the hell was everyone at gamespot so up its arse before it came out?

As soon as the DLC got announced.

I still think the game's a lot of fun, but I'm the type to actively seek out games that feature player vs a.i as an option. And it just so happens that the bots in this game are pretty good.

@mmmorrowind92: I'd say a lot of that was to do with the fact that they had a group of friends/colleagues to play with, that usually makes these things feel so much better than they will be for the regular people who have to match-make with random players most of the time.

@sweep said:

Yikes...

@sweep: heh wow, lfd2 is almost like a sine wave

I think it had something to do with the game design itself. You can't ask five people to play together where the loss of even one due to dropout or bad connection can destroy the game for all. A proper competitive game can continue to be fun even when the teams are imbalanced. With Evolve, if one of the hunter players drops, the game becomes harder; if the monster drops, the whole thing's a bust.

Did it ever truly live?

I just picked it up around two months ago and never had a problem getting into a game. I even played a few matches last week. I was on PS4, if you're wondering.

I think this is it.

I really loved Evolve, but I stopped playing about a month in because the quality of matches varied wildly due to teammates skill level.

A game like Left4Dead is able to overcome this because it's all AI based and not entirely reliant on everyone playing their class. You can have a shitty teammate in Left4Dead and pick up the slack for them. In Evolve a game can be completely ruined by someone not playing their class right.

Evolve seemed like a cool idea, but didn't have enough content to hold onto a large playerbase imo. When I tried the alpha I got serious Titanfall vibes. It felt like a game I'd love to play, but I got no sense of variety at all. Not to mention having even one terrible player completely ruined the experience. Even if they were the monster. A terrible monster was no fun whatsoever, and a terrible companion meant that your chances of winning were slim to none.

Related to this, I keep thinking that asymmetric esports (at least, those that go beyond character/role diversity in their asymmetry) probably don't work.

People liked playing as hunters , but kept getting put in the monster role.

Monster players were a smaller subset. Game could of used an ai drive avatar like thing of the good monster players.

Bad hype, bad marketing, well-intentioned but ultimately badly implemented gamplay and design... It was a ballsy move for a AAA game, but too many little things came together to kill it and it was seemingly never given a solid chance by the players/publishers to rebound once the game started losing steam.

They ruined any chances the game had with its awful DLC scheme, simple as that. No one wants to pay $100+ just to get all most of the content in a multiplayer-only game.

That's not really true though. A competetive game can continue to be fun with bots, sure, but it's most often still going to be a bust. If someone abandons in CS their team is likely to lose. Same thing in Dota.

I was thinking the same. I just realised that those peaks are likely weekends, see how they happen 4 times a month?

@mindbullet I think you're right, it was probably a combination of all those factors. I was going to give it a go but when I saw how they chopped up the content into all those different packs and realising that it would be little fun as someone without a group of friends to play with made me skip it. Glad I did as it obviously didn't pan out.

The game seemed like a classic case of marketing counter-productively blowing it up into something it wasn't. Instead of being a mid-tier multiplayer game they seemed determined to create the impression of it as being on the same 'blockbuster' level as a CoD or BF. When the paucity of stuff in the game and the f2l-style drip-feed of that 'content' in comparison to those games became apparent it put a lot of people off. Sell it at half the price with less parcelling out of chunks of the game as DLC and people would have been far more receptive to it I am certain. With a multi-focused game that isn't f2p you need to know friends you play with regularly are buying it, playing it and enjoying it. They didn't seem to understand that. Negative word of mouth on a game like this means one annoyed customer or lost sale then quickly becomes four or five lost sales, or at 'best' lost regular players who already bought the game.

And then the game turned out to not be as good as Left 4 Dead anyway, so maybe Valve were the reason that game was as good as it was, they seem to be very good at at making MP games which are simple to learn but have lots of depth beyond that and which people want to play for a long time.

Man, this game gets a bad rep but I honestly loved every second of the 150 or so hours I put into Evolve. It had some huge issues at launch and a really terrible PR strategy that blew the rather harmless dlc out of proportion. I read somewhere earlier that 2K is going to stick with this series and at least give it another go which is great. If they can take the base game of Evolve and just pile a TON of content onto it with maybe some kind of single player campaign that could be excellent.

To answer your question though, it seems like the console player base is still going relatively strong, I know they implemented a whole new skill based matchmaking system just last week which may be causing some connection issues. Sadly though it seems like the PC crowd for this game as all but dried up. Man, I really need to get back to this game sometime.

@deerokus: 2K had perfect marketing campaign they generated spades of hype using the e-sport angle to push the season pass before people realized Evolve was a shell of a game.

@yummylee: I feel that was its downfall tbh. If you're so concentrated in making it "e-sports friendly" I think you risk losing focus on the game itself really.

I think the premise is great but they made some misguided choices in the design that killed the game before it even released. DLC monsters, lack of variety, badly balanced monsters, boring progression, no single player. The real reason I made this post was so I could say that the sequel really need to... evolve the format.

Yeah, I looked this up last week myself out of morbid curiosity. It still isn't anywhere near the top 100 games on Steam right now, and currently has... 479 people in-game. That's it. By comparison (and yes, I'm cherry-picking), Farm Simulator 2015 has 1,761 people currently in-game. It kind of reminds me of a UPF a few weeks back in which Jeff got bored, scratched his chin, and loaded up a Quake 3 / Unreal Tournament clone that he'd recently done an Unfinished video for. 0 people playing it, so he booted up Just Cause 2's multiplayer mod for comparison and found a small but thriving community. A truly grim comparison, indeed. Thanks, Jeff. :-P On the plus side, I actually starting playing Just Cause 2 after remembering that video and yeah, it's a pretty good game.

Back on topic, though... Evolve died pretty fast. It had a decent concept, but it was both barebones at launch and, as others have said, was too variable in quality. So much was trimmed off for DLC that upgrades and rewards for playing were too far and few between. There was no single player campaign to speak of, and the multiplayer matches only had so many ways to tinker with the formula. Eventually, the game fell into a kind of rut in which each match was the same story: monster runs in clockwise / counterclockwise circles trying to reach level 3 while hunters chase after it in the hopes of catching and killing it before it reaches level 3. If the monster gets to level 3, it's probably won. If you catch it at level 1 or 2, you've probably won if you know what you're doing. Rinse and repeat. Depending on the skills of the random PUG hunters and / or monster, you could have an incredibly easy match against a clueless monster or gaggle of bumbling hunters... or an utterly hopeless match. There was never any way to tell until you were in the middle of it. *shrug*

Oh, and that DLC stuff was a nightmare. There were spreadsheets made in attempts to figure out what packages gave you what... and it was the scummiest gaming thing that I'd seen in a while. They actually just recently changed the name of their "season" passes to "hunting season" passes in a PR effort to deflect criticism at the idea of buying multiple season passes for a single game. It's just repugnant, and I ultimately didn't buy the final retail product out of disgust. I've never done that before, so there's that. Yay to boycotting? It's gone on sale a few times, but I've always looked at their business model and gone "nope. Not for twenty bucks. Not for ten. When you're down to five dollars on a steam sale this Christmas, then I'll consider buying the base product for a single weekend romp. That's as much commitment as you'll get from me after pushing a $100 PC Monster Race Edition that didn't even include all the initial launch-day DLC. Even Activision's Call of Duty franchise has never stooped that low."

Edit addition: and lest someone try the old "you could play the multiplayer matches against bots as a single player 'campaign' mode" defense... no, I'm not counting that. Yeah, the multiplayer had bits of exposition before matches to "set the stage." If you played several multiplayer bot matches in a row, theoretically those exposition bits could kind of chain things together into a clumsy, broken narrative. However, that's not what a single player campaign is. Or at the very least, that's not what one should be. A five to six hour long campaign through jungles and damaged facilities rescuing survivors, slaying monsters, and trying to figure out just what went wrong on Planet Hellnaw would have gone a long way towards world building and value to the consumer. Characters could be developed, mechanics explained before multiplayer shenanigans commence, and so forth. Instead, you just get bot matches on multiplayer maps you've already seen before. Ugh.

I played the first beta on pc and only got through a few matches. I couldn't figure out wtf I was supposed to do and was to bored with it to spend any more time figuring it out. Graphics were great though

Immediately?

I think I played more of the iOS match 3 game than I did of evolve itself.

Slightly off topic but can anyone name a game that has been a success after being marketed as the next big esport? I'm struggling to think of one off the top of my head.

I feel like the game dried up on PC within a month--maybe even three weeks. It was a fine enough game but it just lacked that intangible factor to make it successful. There is still a good idea within Evolve but that game was not the proof of concept they needed to make it shine.

Also--all those DLC plans/PC MONSTER RACE EDITION pre-release hullabaloo did not help endear itself to people who actually follow gaming closely. The main game sans DLC felt a bit thin and some of the unlock progression was wonky.

I think the closest is probably Starcraft 2 but I've no idea how well that's doing any more. It's certainly not as big a success as I think they'd like it to have been. LoL and DOTA 2 are just killing it with their prize pools.

But SC2 was also sold as having a campaign and a tool box and being an E-Sport that follows up on probably one of the original E-Sport success stories. Evolves marketing just shouted E-Sports a lot and hoped for the best.

The second the decision was made to heavily push and force the ESports amgle. E-sports have to grow organically in the beginning. Too much forced bullshit is a guaranteed fail. I wonder if whoever made that decision ever took a moment to think about how internet denizens would react to having another esport shoved in their face, as if it had been around for years.

A too expensive game with too expensive DLC, it was dead on arrival.

Game should've been F2P, rotating characters, buy the ones you like - like Killer Instinct and League. I would've at least tried it if the cost of entry was nothing.

It did learn one lesson though, never restrict maps to DLC, it just splits the potential playerbase. CoD gets away with it by being stonking huge.