Finally cracking the top 20 of downloads on Steam is Evolve after it became free to play, following the release of Evolve Stage 2. Gamespot mentions while it will not be available for PS4 players, Xbox One players can download and play it until 11:59 PDT on July 9 and PC players have until 10 AM on the same day as part of its free weekend event. Evolve is a game where four players or hunters team up to take down a monster, whose goal is to get stronger and take down the hunters. The Hunters play in first-person perspective while the player controlling the monster plays in a third-person perspective. The original Evolve debuted in 2015 for Microsoft Window, PS4 and Xbox One. The switch on Steam from from pay to play to free-to-play gave a lot more people to the game, ones who don’t like to spend money on Steam to play games when you can just download some good ones for free.
Kotaku says that the original Evolve rose up all the way to No. 17 with 25,167 concurrent players and PC Gamer says that the day before the releases it had only 157 players; that’s over 24,000 players in one day, all because it became free to play. Logistics wise, it was a good move. If no one is playing your product on a database like Steam, you make your product as cheap as you can and in this case, it needed to be free.
However, when you make a downloaded game free that originally costed money, you run the risk of angering your audience who paid money to play it. On a discussion page about Evolve On Steam several players said things like “It doesn’t feel like Evolve,” or “They took out a bunch of stuff.” So far the complaints are coming from only six users, but since the change was just yesterday, there may be more gamers complaining from here on out.
According to Gamespot, what you will receive when you download the game is five Modes, 19 maps, four classes for a total of 18 hunters and four monsters, which includes the August 2015 update that added an extra trapper and game map.