Sometimes, when a beloved game dies — the dreaded server shutdown that all multiplayer titles eventually face — the community finds ways to resurrect it or keep it accessible in some way. None of this is new, it has been happening for many years; but you may still be surprised to know that Evolve, the asymmetric multiplayer game by Turtle Rock, continues to have a quite respectable level of activity for its age and conditions in 2024.
The game, originally released in 2015 as Legacy, and a year later re-released by 2K as a free-to-play version called Stage 2. Once the developers decided to cut the service, one would think that Evolve would have become inaccessible forever, right? But that’s not the case.
It has been nearly ten years since it was removed from the Steam catalog (no one can buy it or add it to their library anymore), but Evolve still has daily peaks of 20 or 30 simultaneous players on Steam; not to mention those playing on PC through an emulator or on PS4 or Xbox One. They may not be many, but under these circumstances, we would probably agree that it’s an impressive number. How do they manage to keep going, you wonder?
How Evolve is still running in 2024
Realistically, the matchmaking system may no longer consistently find matches for you; but private matches still function normally, and there are Discord communities that organize games. They even offered free keys to anyone who wanted to try the game and found it no longer available in the Steam store.
Playing Evolve in 2024 has its challenges: while the peer-to-peer connection makes it easy to invite friends and play, access to the game is very restricted. The hardest part is having the Stage 2 version in your Steam library, which requires a key from physical games or gray market stores; from there, you can switch to the Legacy branch from the properties menu or download the necessary files from the internet.
Once you have access to the game on Steam, all you need to do is download a mod called rice_fix, which can be found on the “Evolve Reunited 2.0” Discord server. Everything is ready from there. In that same space, you have all the information you need, including a list of questions and answers covering all imaginable technical issues. But this is not a tutorial; it’s just a reminder that this exists.
Interestingly, even today there are many people who see Evolve as a kind of misunderstood game of its time; and they argue that if certain elements had changed — some blame it on monetization, others on the lack of campaign material or other reasons — its story would have been much more successful. In other words, the foundation was so solid that it could have thrived in a slightly more favorable environment for its growth.
Evolve was one of the first games as a service to face the harsh realities of an incredibly difficult market, leaving enthusiasts who saw the game’s potential in a somewhat bleak situation: if it had solely been in the hands of Turtle Rock, who knows what would have happened, but the rights belong to 2K, a triple-A publisher, and the chances of seeing another relaunch are slim.
But they say “never say never,” and in recent years we have seen similar ideas like Gigantic (Motiga). We will have to keep our fingers crossed. In the meantime, we will settle for playing custom games with the remaining loyal players.
In 3DJuegos | If you’re playing the latest shooter, or planning to, you need to read this to learn everything you need to know about the Warhammer 40,000 universe and understand Space Marine 2
In 3DJuegos | The most broken weapon in the history of video games has been wreaking havoc for 9 years and even has its own website documenting it. The case of Telesto in Destiny 2 is not normal
