Facts first: at the end of August 2019, as already planned, Sony took Driveclub off the PlayStation Store. Gone from the store were the PS4-exclusive racing game, the Driveclub Bikes expansion, the many DLCs and also Driveclub VR, one of PlayStation VR’s launch titles. Only four items were left in the store search: two trailers, a console theme and a ShareFactory theme.
In practice, this means that from then on the only way to buy the game was on physical media. Those who had already bought the game and the additional content in digital form kept access to everything, but with a deadline for the online part: Sony announced that Driveclub’s online services would be shut down on March 31, 2020.
A rough debut
Driveclub was developed by Evolution Studios, the same studio behind the MotorStorm series, and announced at the PS4 reveal on February 20, 2013. After a few delays, it reached stores in October 2014, with serious connection problems in precisely the feature that gave the game its name, online clubs. Evolution even gave the first paid DLCs away for free to affected players, and the free edition for PlayStation Plus subscribers, promised for launch, only came out in June 2015.
The numbers help explain the rest of the story: the cars averaged 260 thousand polygons, the game ran at 1080p and 30 frames per second, and by July 2015 it had already sold 2 million copies. Evolution kept up 18 months of free updates, with rain, new tracks and a highly praised photo mode, until it was closed by Sony on March 22, 2016, the same day as the last DLC pack, called “Finish Line”. Translated from the jargon: a game that improved a lot after launch, but never shook off its bad early reputation.
What came next
The servers were shut down on 31 March 2020, and since then Driveclub can no longer be bought digitally.
Source: Eurogamer.
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment.