The survival MMO ARK Survival Evolved (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Mobile) is once again among the most successful games on Steam in summer 2019. The strong player numbers even astonish the developers themselves. The reasons cited are the passion of the team and the success of the “Season Pass” model. How have the player numbers for ARK developed?
Who is speaking? It is Jesse Rapczak, one of the founders of Studio Wildcards. Together with his partner and study friend, Jeremy Stieglitz, who had to remain anonymous for a long time, Rapczak is the frontman of the studio.
Together, the two have gone through many successes and crises in recent years. Rapczak provides insight into the recent success of ARK in an interview with Venturebeat.
ARK has more players in 2019 than in 2015
This is what Rapczak says about the success:
If someone had told me that you have more players in 2019 than 4 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.
But it turns out that the team here at Studio Wildcard is so passionate about ARK that they work to keep the game exciting, so players keep coming back and investing countless hours into the world that we build month by month, year by year.
What do they attribute their success to? ARK is still doing well in 2019:
- The game is still frequently in the Top 10 of the most played games on Steam
- And now the new ARK-Genesis Season Pass for $35 has been released. This has consistently driven player numbers above 50,000 since its launch.
ARK – steadily on Steam since 2015
Here are the Steam numbers: After the last major expansion that came in winter 2018, the numbers for ARK Survival Evolved continued to decline. But since June 2019, they have been on the rise again.
While they’re not quite back to the peak level of November 2018, the peak numbers since June 2019 are noticeably stronger than in the first half of the year.
Throughout the four years, it is interesting that ARK was never really gone – it was always being played. In fact, ARK had more players in July 2019 (on average 47,442) than in July 2015 (46,764).
There were two major highlights when expansions came out. During those times, the game surpassed 50,000 players on average (February 2017/November 2018).
This is why the Season Pass is so important: Rapczak says the Season Pass is immensely important for financing ARK since there are no subscription fees. This Season Pass ensures that the lights stay on.
In 2016, there was still excitement about the expansion “Scorched Earth” coming and wanting money for it while ARK was still in Early Access. Today, this is no longer a problem.
Season Pass as a driver for improving ARK
What happens with the money? The money from the Season Pass helps the team continue to develop and improve ARK. They worked last year to solve a problem where players would fall through the world.
This “Undermeshing” has been reduced by 90% on PC, Xbox One, and PS4, and 4,300 players have been banned.
The money from the Season Pass can be used to bring big updates to ARK Survival Evolved throughout the year and to work on comfort improvements.
This is how ARK moves forward: Just a few days ago, the team announced that ARK will now run longer than originally planned. The Genesis expansion will be released in 2019 and 2020 as a two-parter.
Originally, the studio had already made plans for ARK 2 – but the good numbers from the first part convinced the studio that ARK Survival Evolved deserves a longer development cycle than originally intended.
