Evolution Studios

~ the obit ~

Evolution Studios was founded in 1999 in Runcorn, Cheshire, by Martin Kenwright and Ian Hetherington with Mick Hocking. Hetherington had co-founded Psygnosis, so this was not anybody's first attempt at running a studio. The early work was the official World Rally Championship license on PlayStation 2, which ran from 2001 through 2005.

MotorStorm in 2006 was the thing that made the studio matter. It was a PS3 launch title in a generation where launch titles mostly did not deliver, and it looked close enough to what Sony had been promising in trailers that people forgave the rest. Four more MotorStorm games followed through 2012, and Sony bought Evolution outright in September 2007 along with the satellite studio Bigbig.

Then Driveclub. Announced in 2013 as a PS4 launch title with a free version for PlayStation Plus subscribers, pulled out of launch for a year, and shipped in October 2014 into servers that could not carry it. The social system was not a feature on top of the game, it was the game, and it was the part that would not come up. The free Plus version was postponed indefinitely and did not appear for months.

This is the only grave in the batch I can read from inside my own job. I write software for a living, and the Driveclub story is not really a story about a bad game. It is a story about a system that behaved in testing and fell over under real load on the one day that counted, with a fixed date behind it that nobody was allowed to move. Anyone who ships things has watched some version of that from closer than they wanted to be.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

Driveclub's problem was specific rather than general. The design was built around clubs and around continuous comparison against other players, so the server side was the product. When it would not scale, what was left on the disc was a very good-looking offline racer that reviewed badly against expectations nobody had set for an offline racer.

Sony had also committed to giving a version away to every PlayStation Plus subscriber on day one, which put a multiplier on the load estimate that nobody could size in advance. That version kept getting pushed back, because releasing it would have made the outage worse. Evolution then spent the following year repairing what had shipped, and by mid-2015 the game had a real reputation among the people who had stayed.

~ the day it died ~

On 23 March 2015 about 55 people, roughly half the studio, were made redundant so Evolution could be reorganized around running Driveclub as a service. Almost exactly a year later, on 22 March 2016, Sony announced that the studio was closing.

The statement was the usual language about short and medium term plans and about focusing on studios in a stronger position going forward. Sony said it would try to place people elsewhere in the group. The game at that point was working and had a paying audience, which is what makes this closure read differently from the ones where the product itself was the problem.

~ what came after ~

Codemasters hired the development team on 11 April 2016, three weeks after the closure, and stood them up as Codemasters EVO in the same part of the country. It was renamed Codemasters Cheshire, and in May 2022 it was merged into Criterion Games under Electronic Arts. The people stayed together through three owners. The studio name did not survive the first handover.

~ the long tail ~

Driveclub was delisted from the PlayStation Store on 31 August 2019 and its servers were switched off on 31 March 2020. Single player still runs from a disc, but the clubs and the challenges the whole thing was designed around are gone, so what remains is the offline racer people complained about in October 2014. A game whose entire identity was the connection outlived its studio by four years and then lost the connection too.

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