Evolve Designer Talks Shop About Why the Game Failed

As we reported earlier, Evolve is starting the slow death of server shutdown, which has been an upsetting period for many fans. Perhaps to ‘celebrate’ this moment, Evolve writer and designer Matt Colville went to Reddit to talk about Evolve’s history, and why the game might have been doomed from the word go. And as it turned out, when it was first imagined, it was very different from what was eventually put out.
 

"We believed we were making an alien world you were going to explore, and we intended to make it awesome… But there was no way to get that game greenlit. The hook we pitched--and which we 100% believed in by the way--was 4v1. You see, when you pitch a game to a publisher, they think the most important thing is "what is unique about this game that no one can get anywhere else?" So "it will be awesome and people will love it and it will sell 10 million copies"

Sounds reasonable enough, right? But as it turned out, the problem with the 4v1 formula – which they identified fairly early on – is that the internal tests were kind of skewed, because “everyone was role-playing”. The moment someone decided it was time to actually win, the game’s balance was thrown out of whack.
 

The fact that all the heroes were A: all different from each other, mechanically, and B: all the monsters were each different from each other, mechanically, AND neither Heroes nor Monsters used any of the same mechanics! Made it very very hard to balance new heroes and monsters. Like, the existence of Lazarus meant a lot of stuff we wanted to do, had to be super watered down because Lazarus broke all the rules. Maggies' pet trapjaw broke all the rules.

He also blamed the price: 60 dollars is a steep price for a normal game, but if you want to play with your three friends, it’s effectively 240 bucks. Finally, he blamed the lack of content updates, since a game that lives and dies on multiplayer always needs new stuff to keep it fresh.

I suggest you read the whole thing, it’s a really good read and a look into the mind of a developer and the world of publishing.