The story of how an indie developer, having banned Steam keys, got 180 thousand players online

Be afraid of your desires. A good example of the phrase is the history of cosmosim Evolution. In the course of a series of misadventures, an indie game that no one needed for two years suddenly took 180,000 players online.

The background of “success” is ordinary and did not portend sudden turns. A team of two HyperReuts developers has released a project, a budget multiplayer space shooter in the spirit of Everspace. The team called the game Evolution.

There have been no updates to the game for two years. Her online did not exceed 3 people. As for sales, they have not reached the $100 mark for the entire time that the game was on Steam (this is at a price of $9.99).

Eric, one of the developers, tried to fix the situation. For example, he gave away ten thousand keys. However, not very successfully. Most of them immediately got on various services, where they were taken to distribute them illegally.

The latter, by the way, did not affect the number of players in any way. As the game was not bought on Steam, so it was not bought from those who tried to sell the key received for free.

This fall, HyperReuts decided that it was time to do something. They called it rebranding. He implied the addition of numerous innovations, after which the game can be tried again to promote.

The first step into a bright future was the ban of keys. However, Eric, who pressed the button, did not know that by doing this he not only liquidates the keys available for sale, but also bans the already activated ones.

Such a step caused indignation among users, who immediately began to minus the game. As Eric wrote on Steam, “It’s funny, no one is playing, but as soon as I made a mistake, I immediately had an audience of such size, which never existed.”

The aggressive reaction of users forced HyperReuts to take hasty measures. Eric wrote to Valve, asking them to roll back the key ban. However, he was refused several times without explanation.

Then Eric proposed a compromise solution. He rolled out an update and asked to make his game free for a week so that everyone who wanted to add Evolution to their library could do it. This is what the Steam management went for.

However, Eric could not have predicted that such an action would lead to another problem. On the same day that the game was made free, thousands of players rushed into it. The number of visits reached 180 thousand.

The game was not designed for such loads. As a result, some of the players have not been able to play yet. Moreover, now Eric is already writing that he wanted there to be fewer one-time visits, since he cannot afford a server that will support such an online one.

The second problem of the free week is that Evolution does not provide additional monetization. Therefore, it is possible that at the end of the campaign, the project will lose the audience as quickly as it acquired it.

By the way, there are enough positive reviews for the project today. However, most of them do not concern the game, but the moral qualities of the developer who solved the situation in an original way.

Update (from 27.10.2018)

The story turned out to have a good ending. Despite the fact that the game has become paid again, there is still “life” in it. She has a dedicated community that now helps developers with translating the game into other languages and polishing AI. In addition, the game has a good online for an indie project. At the time of writing the update to the material, it is kept at the level of 500 people, and on Friday it even reached 1300.