Studio Wildcard promised that there would never be microtransactions in ARK Survival Evolved an now suddenly dinosaur skins popped up in the Xbox Marketplace and PlayStation Store that players can purchase.
In 2015, Studio Wildcard announced that there would never be microtransactions in ARK Survival Evolved – not even for cosmetics. Head developer Jeremy Stieglitz himself wrote a forum post on Steam regarding this.
Stieglitz assured: “We, as Studio Wildcard, are against any form of in-game monetization. We have seen too often how otherwise good games have been distorted by this.”
On Reddit, user silverbullet1989 noted that there are recently 6 dinosaur skins available for purchase. The cosmetics are available in the Xbox Marketplace and PlayStation Store. The skins have a single price of £0.79 in the respective shops, while all together cost £5. Originally, these skins were part of a preorder deal for the retail release of ARK in August.
Those who pre-ordered ARK Survival Evolved received these unique bionic skins as a bonus:
- The “ARK: Survival Evolved Bionic Raptor Skin” can also be found in the German Xbox Store for €0.99.
- The “Bionic Quetzal Skin” can be purchased in the German PlayStation Store for €1.19.
The community is disappointed – complaining about further problems
In his post on Reddit, silverbullet1989 describes the current problems of the survival MMO:
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- ARK was released with too few servers. Due to too many players on too few servers, the performance suffers significantly – making ARK completely unplayable for some.
- Characters are regularly deleted due to a bug
- ARK has bugs and glitches that players can exploit for their advantage. There are “holes” in the maps, through which players can slip under the map and kill other players hidden from view.
- Currently, there are strong rumors that items and dinos are still being “duped”. Duping refers to exploiting a bug to clone items or money in a game.
The user notes that Wildcard is now demanding a full triple-A game price for ARK, offering a season pass and has a collector’s edition. Thus, ARK Survival Evolved markets itself as a full-fledged triple-A game, but still struggles with the aforementioned issues.
Now, in addition to the massive problems, there is the broken promise of microtransactions. Wildcard is being labeled an untrustworthy studio in the comments to the post.
Some players have lost faith in the developers and are disappointed. Even if the 6 skins could be seen as a minor issue, players now fear for the future of the game. After all, a game like ARK has too many mechanics where microtransactions could be implemented.
Wildcard justifies the microtransactions with retail sales
ARK’s community manager Jat commented on Reddit about the introduced microtransactions. The bionic skins were part of a preorder deal for retail.
According to Jat, it was absolutely necessary for Wildcard to offer such a deal to gain support for the retail launch. In the United States, there are only a few retailers left that primarily work with large publishers. For indie studios like Wildcard, it is extremely difficult to get into retail. Wildcard had to finalize some deals for retail that the developers were not happy with.
When the exclusive period of the retail deal expired, Wildcard was obliged to bring the 6 bionic dinosaur skins as DLC to Xbox and PS4. It was also not allowed to offer these as free DLC.
These are legal obligations that Wildcard had to fulfill as part of the release. However, they tried to keep the price as low as possible. Wildcard has no plans to introduce more microtransactions in ARK. More cosmetics are set to be released that will be available for free through
- events
- the achievement system
- or they will be tied to the season pass.
Jat promised that there will never be microtransactions in ARK again and that the bionic skins are the exception.
In the community, an explanation had been desired earlier. The microtransactions came out of nowhere for the players and caused anger and disappointment.
Regarding the other mentioned problems, Wildcard remains silent.
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