‘We understand [it] was confusing’
Evolve‘s pre-order campaign was, without hyperbole, a shitshow. Jordan weighed in when the game was first announced, and opined that it was way too early to pre-order the game. By the time it released, there was more than $60 worth of content that wasn’t covered by the season pass, but a lot of it could be secured via various pre-orders. Turtle Rock repeatedly defended the practice, but most people didn’t buy those theories.
In fact, most people still want an answer or statement for how this pre-order DLC campaign went down. Turtle Rock did a reddit AMA today about the state of Evolve. The highest upvoted question was “In retrospect, how do you feel about the pre-order fiasco? It was a huge mountain of controversy for you guys and you got a ton of bad press. How will this affect future game releases from your team?” Turtle Rock managed to completely skirt the question.
After two hours and some prodding, producer Chloe Skew finally responded with a non-answer. “Thanks for your question and sorry for the delay. We understand that the pre-order situation was confusing and people were overwhelmed by the promise of upcoming DLC before we launched. We learned a lot from the experience and we’ll continue to adapt as necessary to make great games that our community can feel good about,” she said.
To be fair, this probably isn’t Skew’s topic to speak on. The pre-order campaign was likely entirely in the hands of 2K Games. Maybe someday, someone will give an honest opinion about whether there was contention between developer and publisher over this, if anyone foresaw it being a trainwreck, or if it’ll prevent something similar from happening again. It’s just a shame that this snafu is going to be Evolve‘s legacy in a lot of people’s minds.
We are Turtle Rock Studios, creators of Left 4 Dead, currently working on Evolve. AMA (2.0)! [reddit]
