One misclick led to an all time high in concurrent players

HyperReuts released Evolvation over in February of 2017. Since then, they've seen little to no success, averaging about one concurrent player per day. In the last week they peaked at over 170,000 concurrent players, due to one misclick from the developers.

One misclick led to an all time high in concurrent players
Evolvation is an indie spaceship-based shooter that came out in February 2017. It was developed by two people, and typically had an average concurrent player count of one person. Fast-forward to October 8, 2018, and the game hit an all-time peak of 172,870 concurrent players. So, what happened? Believe it or not, it all started at the beginning of this month, with one misclick.

The game's developers, HyperReuts, accidentally disabled many of Evolvation's Steam keys. In a blog post on Steam the developer detailed how it had given out
10,000 free steam codes in an effort to expand the player base as part of the
2.0 update. What the developer found, however, was that many of these keys were
being sold illegally by the people that they had sent them to. The developer
did not want to allow these people to profit off their work, so they looked to
see what they could do. They found an option that allowed them to ban the free
keys, and accidentally banned many of the legitimate keys that had been
purchased or used properly.

What followed was an ugly bombardment of negative reviews. Many people were upset regarding the fact that their legitimate keys had been banned for no reason, and the overall review status had changed to "very negative". The developers took to the store's support to figure out a solution before their public standing had been destroyed. Steam support repeatedly denied their requests for new keys to give out or undo the ban that they had placed; instead, the solution they fell upon was to make the game temporarily free to play.

This led to a host of other problems that would have their game's page getting further bombarded with negative reviews. Due to the game now being free, they saw a tremendous number of people download the game, which led to them going from one to over 172,000 concurrent players in a matter of a day. With that, however, came a host of technical issues. Simply put, the game's servers were not built to host that many players at once, and players went off on the game's store page again. The developers addressed the server troubles and coming fixes in another blog
update
.

In the meantime we are upgrading the servers but we cannot act in a matter of hours. We hope this is fixed within 24 hours! I also expect a lot less concurrent logins at that time. I do not have the money (or receiving any) to setup a server which is able to process 180k concurrent requests. So bear with me and try the game in a couple of days 🙂

One misclick led to an all time high in concurrent players. Player concurrency rose dramatically in the last week.
The game has no monetisation options included in it, unlike most free to play games, and the developer claims that they have made no more than $100 off of the game. It is both a huge breakthrough for this studio, should they choose to include a monetisation options in the future, but they have their hands full at the moment, balancing the needs of their new audience and the server issues at hand. Their time in the sun just might run out before they get a real chance to capitalize on the game's popularity.

The adage, "all publicity is good publicity" has never seemed truer.

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