Evolve Will Be Free-to-Play

As speculated on yesterday, developer Turtle Rock Studios has confirmed that Evolve will be adopting the free-to-play model.

Starting from some point today the game will transition to a Beta version of the free-to-play model on PC. With this news, the developer has promised that Evolve will receive regular updates to help improve the game going forward. For those of you who already own the game, you’ll be given a new ‘Founder’ status and receive rewards, gifts and special access going forward.

We’re going to make Evolve free on PC as a Beta starting on July 7. This is going to allow us to hit our new server infrastructure really hard and we need your help testing. Stuff could break, and that’s our hope, because that will give us time to improve things as we go.

We’ll parse out major Beta revisions, updates and features over a period of weeks and months — a plan we’re going to continually communicate here. This allows us to test new features and major changes to make our game more accessible and ever closer to the joy we saw when we first showed our baby to the world. Just as importantly, this Beta plan gives us the flexibility and time we need to keep fixing bugs and making Evolve more stable.

Turtle Rock Studios has already laid out a list of planned future improvements to the game including improving the games performance, stability, and balance. Furthermore, they’ll be reworking the unlock system and the game’s tutorials.

• Reworking the hunter classes to make the team less reliant on having experienced trappers and medics.
• Improvements to the maps and UI.
• Improving load times, overall performance, and getting you into the game faster.
• Focusing on improving stability and fixing bugs.
• Completely reworking our progression system and tutorials.
• Adding more customization options.

Although the initial change will only be on PC there are plans to adopt the same pay model on consoles should it prove successful.

The beta is on Steam because it allows us to iterate very quickly, to listen to feedback and respond in record time (we are able to work on a weekly patch schedule.) We can test new features most effectively here, figure out what works and what doesn’t with intent to bring it to the consoles should it prove successful.

So are you interested in going back to Evolve? Let us know below.