Turtle Rock Studios Ends Development On Evolve Stage 2

If you were hoping that Evolve Stage 2 and the move to a free-to-play model would bring with it awesome new updates for an indefinite span of time, today's news may disappoint you. According to publisher 2K, Turtle Rock Studios has ended development on Evolve Stage 2, deeming it "complete," and handed the responsibility of "day-to-day server operation" off to it.

No future updates are planned at this time, "as development on Evolve Stage 2 is complete," but the servers will remain online for the foreseeable future. 2K states that it "will continue to evaluate the possibility of bringing Evolve Stage 2 to console, but maintaining and growing the game’s audience on PC is the primary focus."

In a letter to its community, Turtle Rock Studios elaborated on the end of development as follows.

Seems like the greater things you aspire to, the more time it takes. We had huge aspirations for Evolve, and while we got to spend five and a half awesome years on planet Shear with a ragtag group of Planet Tamers and fearsome Monsters, it still doesn’t feel like enough - we were hungry for more but unfortunately today is the last day that Turtle Rock Studios can work on Evolve.

It’s always hard to leave one of our games behind. 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.

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There’s a lot that we really wish we could have done, especially taking Stage 2 to consoles, but it looks like that’s just not meant to be.

While the news is unfortunate, the game will continue to be playable, unlike many online games that end development. Furthermore, while the playerbase saw a steep decline following the initial influx when Stage 2 launched, it has remained relatively steady around approximately 1500 concurrent users on average. There are still plenty of players to play with, should you want to jump in and play again.