"The second millennial decade has witnessed an explosion of open-world survival games, particularly on the Steam platform with the success of PC tiles such as DayZ, Ark: Survival Evolved and the battle-royale shooter PlayerUnknown's Battlegrouds.(Yeah, it's out-of-date info with latest updates as the books live in press-time info. And in case somebody wonders about the near future updates a new bugfix and balancing patch is actually to be released this month.)
The genre's trues roots can most likely be traced back to the indie sandbox RPG UnReal World, first released in 1992. Set in Iron Age Finland, player's principal aim was to survive its challenging and harsh environments. Incredibly, the game was still going strong and receiving updates, as of September 2017. The game was developed by two people - head creator Sami Maaranen and programmer Erkka Lehmus (both Finland). As of September 2017, it held the record for longest update support for a videogame."