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Turtle Rock has announced that it will no longer work on Evolve, despite recently releasing a big update on PC that made the game free to play.
In a post on the Evolve forums studio co-founders Chris Ashton and Phil Robb announced that they were moving away from Evolve, after working on it for more than five years. As an independent studio for hire they can only reasonably work on a project for so long, and therefore have to move on to the next thing.
Recently the Stage 2 update hit Evolve on PC, which turned it into a free to play game and brought in thousands of players. It looked like a lifeline for the game that didn’t exactly do well at launch, but today’s news could be the final nail in the coffin. Turtle Rock is leaving Evolve behind before they had the chance to bring the free to play model to the console version of the game.
It’s always hard to leave one of our games behind,” said the studio co-founders in their letter to Evolve players. Left4Dead was no different and now it’s Evolve’s turn. There will always be a special place in our hearts for our past projects. No matter what happens with Evolve in the future, we’ll know it was born in this studio and developed by this team alongside this beautiful community.
This is the life of AAA game developers who aren’t self-funded and don’t own their own IP. We don’t get to make the call. We all know that going in but we still sign the dotted line because we love what we do. We are happy to have gotten the opportunity to do something risky, something new and innovative. We created a brand new Sci-Fi world. We got to go to planet Shear and interact with alien flora and fauna. We got to hunt down, trap and kill giant monsters together. We got to BE the monster. What an awesome experience.”
