ARK: Survival Evolved is an upcoming dinosaur survival game from Studio Wildcard. The game has been on Steam Early Access for less than a week, and is already a great success.
ARK: Survival Evolved has already sold 400,000 copies in Early Access. The game sells at $25, which comes out to $10 million in revenue. In an interview with GamesIndustry, Studio Wildcard co-founder Jesse Rapczak has stated that it is too early to see how profitable the game will be, but that the revenue has already covered the game’s $1.5 million development costs.
The game will not release until June of next year. However, a good amount of the game is already done. Rapczak explains: “80 percent of the main game is done, with hundreds of hours of gameplay there already. It’s just down to balancing and feedback from the players. If all goes well, we may even add more content once the community gets their hands on the mod tools.”
Rapczak has contributed some of the success of the game to Twitch. He states: “We spent the entire week on the top row of Twitch’s main page, and the streamers and viewers are loving the game. Watching people stream the game is better than the best focus group money can buy.”
He credits Jurassic World for some of ARK’s success: “We knew dino fever would be at an all-time high right now for us to take advantage of, and we wanted to be the first truly great dino survival game on the market.”
Rapczak finishes with: “We catch bugs, hear concerns, check our assumptions, and collect gameplay notes at an insane pace. I have never experienced anything like this on another project, and this is a huge benefit of releasing the game to Early Access with so much content and still a year to go before our final launch on PC and Consoles.”
ARK: Survival Evolved will release in June 2016. The game will be available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.