Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You might be aware of Evolve, which has quietly been developing in closed beta up until today. It’s a fairly neat piece of software for gamers: an open gaming platform with various functionality such as chat, VOIP, partying systems with integrated VPN, stats and achievement tracking, and so on. With the big companies trying to corner their bit of the PC market with their own digital download system and accompanying social doohickeys – Steam, Origin, Battle.net etc – this is one way to centralise your social gaming stuff while remaining independent of a publisher’s platform. I mean, hell, I only use one IM chat client, and this serves much the same purpose. Evolve’s mandate is to offer a system that exists alongside the diversity of PC games and digital distribution systems, offering the various systems you might want and it’s a pretty good attempt at doing that. It even has screenshot and video recording in there. As an overlay it already offers a bit more functionality than Steam, especially with older games that can use VPN setups. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s worth taking a look at the open beta, is what I am saying. Evolve have created a special RPS group sign up page here.

UPDATE: Use this link to sign up to the beta, and there’s an RPS group already in there, I believe.

For the past few months I’ve been playing around with an unreleased gaming application called Evolve. It’s an interesting piece of software, rather like Steam without the digital distribution, and with a whole load of other functionality that is otherwise spread across different applications such as Hamachi, Raptor, and so on. Evolve is an attempt to merge all of that stuff into a single system that will encompass both LAN-bridging systems to play older games, and social networking systems to make it easier for people to play in larger groups. It’s a website, a social network for gamers, and an overlay with stuff like an in-game browser. It has even more exciting features planned, too, as this interview reveals.

Impressed by what I’d seen, I decided to talk to founders Michael Amundson and Soren Dreijer and find out a bit more about where the Evolve project – which is about to launch publicly – is going.
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