10 Incredible Video Games You Can't Buy Anymore

In a lot of ways, Evolve is the right game at the wrong time - its asymmetrical multiplayer, hero classes and tactical hunting gameplay are all traits that would have cleaned house if it had been released in 2020 as a free-to-play game. Unfortunately for Turtle Rock Studios, it was released for full-price in 2015 as what some had referred to as one of the first "freemium" titles.

Predating Overwatch by a year and capitalising on the new love of class-based shooting (with one team playing as the human-based hunters, and one as the huge, real-time-evolving predator), 2K saw the opportunity to use the initial praise for the novelty, popularity and innovation of Evolve as a test platform for a new model of aggressive additional monetisation and micro-DLC.

Unfortunately this went down harder than Mecha-Godzilla in an EMP, as £15 GBP for a single monster (after paying £50 for the base game) felt like a gargantuan kick in the goliath gonads. With pop-ups everywhere relentlessly pushing players towards the store (and reminding them of all the content they didn't own), the good faith soured extremely quickly and players migrated away from the game.

As one Reddit user wrote, "the game itself is amazing, but it's like trying to fly the coolest kite in the world during a hailstorm."

Incidentally, Evolve Season 2 did reappear as a free-to-play title, but by this point, all its bridges had been burned. It disappeared again - this time, never to return.