Celebrating a decade of connecting press and creators with games
For the first eight or nine years of its existence, Evolve was just a PR agency—one that’s always tried to do things a bit differently, sure, but we did the same sort of work as any other agency in the space. That changed in May 2015 as we prepared for the launch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and rolled out the Evolve Terminal (as it was called then) to help us better support a rapidly growing network of press and content creators.
It’s hard to believe we launched Terminals.io ten years ago, but yes, it’s been that long! Roll me into the nursing home, I’m ready. But hey, we’re still growing, still pushing out great games, and looking to the future as we build a sustainable platform that’s still giving content creators, media, and PR practitioners value ten years from now.
We have some big updates planned to celebrate the anniversary, but more on that in a bit. First, get ready for a little numbers and achievements section. In the past decade, we’ve:
- Rolled out more than 950 games from indie and AAA, including The Witcher 3, Fortnite, Dave the Diver, Enshrouded, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Cyberpunk 2077, Moonlighter, Dead Cells, Amnesia Rebirth, Frostpunk, INDIKA, and many more
- Distributed more than 400,000 game keys
- Delivered more than 7600 newsletter campaigns
- Processed more than 64,000 users through our verification queue
- Had server uptime of 99.999% or higher (it’s now 99.99999%, FYI)
- Launched Terminals.io Launch Packages as a lower-cost way for devs and publishers to reach press and creators and helped more than 140 projects through that program so far
- Launched the Terminals Calendar to help people across the industry keep track of upcoming game launches
Fact is: Terminals made all of that so much easier for us. When we started the site, Terminals was one of the first—if not the first? I dunno, it was a long time ago—platforms to streamline key requests and distribution. Since then we’ve seen a wide range of services rise up with what might seem like the same sort of purpose, but we’ve never quite seen anyone as competition—not just because there’s room for everyone (and we’ve only managed our own projects through Terminals), but also because we like to think we offer something a little different.
Why we created Terminals in the first place
As streaming and video platforms exploded, we knew there would come a day when it wouldn’t be feasible to manually manage our contact database, key distribution, and coverage tracking, and we had to find a solution to help our team handle that side of the work so they could focus on more important stuff. That we’re still kicking today is a testament to our team’s vision and the enduring usefulness of that original direction.
Our focus on retaining a human element through media and creator verification, relevance, and overall productivity have always set us apart. Terminals was never meant to just be a faceless key-distribution platform, and we’ve always felt that it was our job to build a platform that not only helped us get games out to our contacts, but to actually do our part to create a sustainable industry, and to use our tools to better serve everyone. We like to say that Evolve (and Terminals by extension) is supported by technology but powered by people. The human layer is critical.
The human element is also about making sure that we consider your time and needs.. Verification is important to help us cut down on scammers, and to help us better connect with people who are serious about their work—not just big media and content creators, but smaller outlets and channels that have always been important to us. Through tags and mailing preferences, we wanted to put control back into press’ and creators’ hands. Rather than spam everyone with news and games they didn’t care about, we gave you the option to limit what you received (or to never get news at all). It took a surprising amount of work to convince some clients that a focus on relevance wouldn’t be a detriment. With an exponential rise in games released, it’s more important than ever that we help you separate the games you care about from the noise. The system we have isn’t perfect, but we’re cooking up some new ways to make relevance an even bigger part of the Terminals experience.
On to the future!
To that point, for the last two years or so, we’ve been working on Terminals 3.0—one of the biggest overhauls we’ve done so far! It introduces some big changes to how the site works on the back end, and will help our teams (and anyone who potentially uses Terminals to manage their game promotion) better collaborate and better focus on supporting relevant content creators and press. Most of you really won’t care about the back end, though, so we’re also introducing some cool features for you. Let’s go over those real quick:
- Digests will allow you to set up daily or weekly news and email digests, fundamentally changing how you get news and info about games on Terminals. I’ma be real: this is a terrifying idea for us, because “send news when it goes out” has been a fundamental part of media relations since long before I started in this career (which was a LONG time ago). But hey, it’s not about us: it’s about you. And you may get way more email than you can handle, so we want to give you more power to decide how and when you digest your email.
- Organizations are a great step up for productivity within media outlets, stream teams, talent agencies, and more, improving your options for collaborating with other people who work on your outlet or channel. Manage permissions, share keys, upload coverage, and more. They should prove super handy for editors and talent managers!
- A plethora of front-end improvements and tweaks will help make the site look better and be easier to navigate, streamline signup and onboarding, and more. We’ll be updating our tags, as well, cleaning those up and reintroducing content-type tags, giving you even more control over the opportunities you’ll hear about from PR, as well as to offer more options for those who produce short-form content on platforms like TikTok, Reels, and YT Shorts. There’s more relevancy for you! It’s a bit of a theme for us this year.
We’ll shed more light on Terminals 3.0 as we approach the launch in June!
To ten more years!
I want to personally thank every single one of you who’s helped make Terminals what it is today. But I can’t because there are just too many of you… soooooo here’s a “thank you to everyone!” tucked into a blog post instead.
We have more improvements coming to Terminals.io itself, and are also setting our sights on future projects to better serve game devs and marketers, media, and content creators. We’d love to hear from you if you have some ideas: hit us up on social or email us at [email protected]! In the meantime, though, we have some absolute bangers coming to the Evolve and Terminals lineups this year, and we really can’t wait to show you more.
Thanks again! We wouldn’t be here without you.