Evolvation Blows up in Population & Negativity
Evolvation is the space indie flyer developed by two devs that comprise HyperReuts. A humble gem of an experience, the title saw an active player count of 1 person earlier this week. That number recently exploded to 180K. But the game has been around since February 2017, so what changed?” Well, as the story goes…
According to Eurogamer, all of HyperReut’s problems started with a misclick (they usually do). In order to build up Evolvation’s playerbase, the devs decided to hand out 10,000 free Steam Keys as part of its 2.0 update. After all, the best way to entice players is to populate the servers. Well, the game did see an influx of players but not for the reasons intended. The Developer discovered that many keys were illegally sold online. Thus, in order to quell the heinous trade, they clicked on “ban keys options” and inadvertently deactivated the legitimate Steam Keys. Oops. I don’t need to mention the repercussions of pissing off the Steam user base. But I’m going to.
What happened next was a review bomb into oblivion. Many angry players scorched the earth of Evolvation’s Steam page, loading it with loads of comments that referenced the cancellation of keys without any sort of warning. Some specifically targeted the developers for their greed.
Since everything was just one gargantuan misunderstanding, the developer appealed to Valve. Without any explanation, the platform denied them the recovery of their Steam Keys. Eventually, Steam offered HyperReuts a solution in the form of making the game free-to-play. Desperate for a saving grace in the face of thousands of angry gamers, the devs readily agreed. Do you think this solved their problem? Fool!
The internet quickly caught wind of the video game freebie and swarmed to Steam. Thanks to the additional blessing of social media, servers witnessed an influx of near 180,000 players overnight. This led to problems, particularly when it came to logging in and selecting ships.
Evolvation is free (to own) on Steam https://t.co/WWTDDF3gaC pic.twitter.com/88dYkbH3tw
— Wario64 (@Wario64) October 8, 2018
“Concurrent logins are exploding!
My server is not made for 180k people logging in at the same time so the servers are overloaded. You will encounter issues like not be able to log in (or long login times). And if you are logged in you probably cannot see any spaceships since they are loaded from the datebase.” See that? That’s a typo – He’s clearly losing his mind.
At the time of this writing, there are around 53,000 active users on Evolvation, which provides a reprieve for the devs. Currently, they lack the funds for servers capable of holding hundreds of thousands of players. Moreover, since the game is free-to-play and all that jazz, I doubt they’ll procure enough finances soon. It’s probably also worth noting that the game’s review score is “Mixed” at the time of this writing. Which means, the review bomb didn’t leave HyperReut’s game in the red. Time will tell whether the space flyer lands on firm ground.
SOURCE: Eurogamer