Former 2K boss says he had “pressure from the top” from the start – afraid it would flop

Who’s talking now? In an interview with GameSpot, Christoph Hartmann explains the failure of Evolve. Hartmann is now the boss of Amazon Games, back then he was the “President of 2K Games”, i.e. responsible for Evolve.

Hartmann tells us that the game was acquired at an auction after THQ went bankrupt and that there was “pressure from above” early on.

The upper management apparently feared that the new game of the “Left 4 Dead” people would be a flop.

Boss hoped for Titanfall – But that showed only-PvP won’t work on Xbox One, PS4

That was the 1st big mistake: Evolve was actually meant to be a pure PvP game. Hartmann said at the time they thought the new Titanfall game would now prove they could sell a pure PVP game on the PS4 and Xbox One consoles. At least that’s what he had hoped.

But in reality, Titanfall tried to sell PvP and it “wouldn’t have really worked out,” so Hartmann had to change his plans at short notice.

The game was PvP only and I felt we had to add PvE to it because otherwise it wouldn’t sell. Titanfall tried to sell “PvP only” and it didn’t really work out. I was hoping that Titanfall would prove that you could sell a PvP-only game on consoles. But it pretty much proved the opposite.

So we made a cheap PvE version that we never should have made.

Christoph Hartmann, then President of 2k Games

What was the 2nd big mistake? The big criticism of Evolve at the time was the pricing model: because the game was released at full price, but offered hunters and monsters as purchasable DLCs. That was ultimately the game’s undoing. Today, Hartmann sees it that way, too:

The right decision would have been to make the game Free2Play from the beginning. It would have been a brave decision – but I looked at the numbers and thought, we have to reach a certain number … I didn’t do it. It would have been a brave decision, but the right one.

Christoph Hartmann, then President of 2k Games

Wrong price model and then came the death spiral

This is behind it: Evolve is a tragic case of a game with an incredible amount of potential that failed because of these bad decisions: Above all, the pricing model proved to be a fatal mistake.

Because with the game, when many saw trailers and understood the concept behind Evolve, they had the impression: Evolve will be a Free2Play game, where you can either earn or optionally buy heroes, monsters and cosmetics – like in League of Legends. That would have been the usual convention then and now for a kind of “hero shooter”.

However, as a full-price title plus purchasable DLCs, it triggered a very negative reaction from many gamers.

Then, as is common with multiplayer games, a kind of death spiral set in: New players stayed away, the regular players got better and better, it became harder and harder to get started, at some point the match search takes too long, and then the game is considered a total flop that no one wants to buy anymore.