Yesterday, I spoke to Studio Wildcard's co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz—who is also Ark: Survival Evolved's lead designer, lead programmer, and development director. The conversation was scheduled ahead of a pretty significant announcement he and his team had planned for today: that the open world survival 'em up planned to wipe its servers, a "mass extinction" as a pre-prepared statement suggested, ahead of its August 8 PC launch. 

This morning, I was informed this was no longer the case, that Stieglitz and Studio Wildcard had made an equally significant 180-degree turn and that Ark would no longer undergo the proposed server wipe. A recent "rash of cheating and hacking" within the game had been billed as grounds for the move, however by rolling out a "fresh cluster network of servers running new code and infrastructure" will prevent similar issues occurring down the line.

Earlier today, I caught up with Stieglitz again to clarify the reversal. Stieglitz answered fully and, given the confusion tied to the relatively dramatic 180-turn, I've opted to publish his responses in full.

PC Gamer: So, in less than 24-hours Studio Wildcard has made a pretty explicit 180 regarding its decision, or lack thereof, to wipe its servers.

Jeremy Stieglitz: Welcome to Wildcard. So after speaking about our decision to wipe servers yesterday I went back and spoke to the team and asked: are we doing the right thing here? There are a lot of different opinions around the round table, so to speak, and we also talked to our community managers who are a little closer to the players than we are. And then, we also talked to our playtest team—the playtest team are actually like just players, they know the game really well, they're volunteers, they tend to take a look at our content, they're not employees so they come at it from an Ark fan standpoint more than anything else. 

We also did another deep dive into the online debates about the wipe versus no wipe situation in Ark. Ultimately we took away from all that it just seemed like a pretty even split. You're talking about basically half the playerbase, even in PvP, that does not want to see this happen. It just doesn't seem like a good, smart move to, probably, piss off half the playerbase. We knew that before too, but we didn't have an exact statistic as such. We knew it was affect a lot of people, but the problem was that before we thought there was no way we could actually have this many servers. One thing we definitely didn't want to do, and we're definitely not doing, is we're not only having the old servers. They are seriously affected by this irreversible hack-a-thon. 

It can be prevented going forward and they could maybe have recovered to some extent because the hacked items get used up through combat and conquest. But ultimately, we want players to have the option, new players especially, to experience the game as it's intended to be played. New servers are necessary and we figured that, even back before when we thought wiping was the only way to deal with this, we were determined that the cost and scope of hosting all the old servers and a good set of new servers which is beyond our means to do. What we found yesterday was that we took a hard look at what it'd take to support that and realised that we actually can do this. We can absorb the cost and scale of hosting the old servers and the new servers if we do a few things to ease our way into this process. 

Number one: we need to take about ten percent of the servers down. Calling it a 'no wipe' is somewhat inaccurate, it'll be a wipe of servers that nobody plays on anymore. I'm talking about servers that literally no one has played on in weeks, these are basically ghost towns. We don't know exactly what servers those are yet but it's literally servers that have no player population. By taking those servers down and doing that on a regular basis going forward—only those that have no player count over a sustained period of time. That may be no servers at some point if all the servers have people on them. If within a period of a few weeks these servers have people on them, that's what we'd consider an active server. This is something we communicated to the playerbase from day one—we discussed wipe versus no wipe plans, we said that servers that have no player population may be marked for obsolescence.

So, if we follow that through on a regular basis going forward, it becomes viable for us to not have an ever-increasing pool of servers in the long term. We feel that that is the kind of approach, at least on the legacy servers, that will enable us to have these legacy servers. Look, do we expect it to be a large portion of servers even in the long term that'll be marked for obsolescence? Unlikely, actually, if there's even one of two people playing on it in a month's time frame it's not our intention to take that down. This will be communicated in advance as we make these terminations in six month intervals so there will be some time. 

By the way, this is different from an actual full wipe, because one of the things you can do in Ark is: if you server is, god forbid, marked for obsolescence, you can take your stuff, your character, your items, your gear, and actually travel to another server, refugee style. That's a mechanic that actually makes it not just like: hey, your progress is gone. That wouldn't have been possible if we had just wiped everything, but that's not what would ever happen. With this approach, when we actually ran the numbers and scaled it to our requirements we decided we can do it. It's costly for us, it's not a small investment of resources or time. 

But we weighed the options and decided this is actually viable for us, it's absorbable for us, and this delivers on what we'd hoped to be able to do for our playerbase—our not insubstantial playerbase—this seemed like a good cost versus benefit calculation at this point. We ultimately did therefore reverse the thinking yesterday and that came about through some serious discussions. Ultimately it was kicked off by talking to [the press]. It was talking to the press, that made us think: Are we really sure about this? That in turn spurred me to go back to the dev team, talk to them about it again, and it just chained out from there until we ultimately came to the U-turn scenario. 

Sometimes development is a pretty iterative process—sometimes we don't get it right first time. [Laughs] We're known for not getting it right first time, among other things. We maybe make a pretty fun game but we definitely don't have a 100 percent batting average, to say the least. That's human and okay, and I, at least in this case, think we didn't get the thinking right. Had we actually pulled the trigger on the gun? That wouldn't have been possible to un-shoot that bullet. There won't be as many new servers as old servers. We have around 400 PvP legacy server sessions and we're probably going to have around 200 new servers for this for the foreseeable future. Even then, the majority of our players would stay on legacy servers because that's where their homes are, so to speak. That's okay, because we'll also have a lot of new players coming in the door as we get to launch and beyond. We think there will be plenty to go round so far as player population but there won't be as many new servers as old servers. 

On the face of it, you've reversed your decision overnight having spoken to the press, playtesters and your team. But surely you must have realised deciding against wiping the servers entirely was possible before now. Why did this decision go down to the wire?

To be blunt, it's a pretty large expense, we're basically looking at $100,000 per month additional to host the legacy servers, in addition to the $100,000 it costs a month to host the new servers. This is something we can afford as a successful company but it's expensive and it's non-trivial. It's not even just that, obviously the cost calculations are cold, cynical calculations—it's more than that, it's also about people in personnel, it takes manpower to host these servers. There are people who maintain them, upgrade them, keep them operating, fix problems on them when they inevitably occur. Those people who manage those servers are also part of our core development team. When they found out they have to manage, nearly, double the number of servers, they kind of flipped a shit. That's just human nature, they were like: great, now I have double the work forever. 

Now, how do we deal with that? Well, we hire more help, basically, that's the answer to that. We also don't want to grow too much, too fast—that has its own problems. But I think the right time to grow if you're going to do it is when you launch retail. This was a combination of factors, there was also some technical scalability of our tools, of operating that amount of machines. We had to really think through the process and once we did, it's just on the right side of viable for us. 

Could we have thought through that detail earlier? Certainly, sure. The difference is, sometimes you might chalk it up to laziness or flippancy but from a design standpoint you might say it's 'cleaner' for us to have less servers. From a design standpoint, then, when I think as a designer I think: well, we want to have a perfect game which lets none of the growing pains getting from A to B drag you down, so to speak. But as a player that's a different calculation—you're more emotionally attached, understandably and justifiably, to this world you've built. It doesn't matter about how much the abstract design might be benefited by cleaning everything up, you've put your effort into making this thing a reality. For someone to arbitrarily say: I just want to wipe that off the map, that doesn't make you feel good, no matter what they tell you. 

People play games for emotional reasons, they play games to have fun. If you think about that from that perspective it makes sense. As far as why we didn't think of that earlier—we were maybe to focused on the abstracts of design, not enough on the needs of the playerbase. It was the wrong call—there's no other way to say it.

While I appreciate nothing is 100 percent certain and nothing can be guaranteed, given a server wipe was considered this time—can you reassure players that this won't happen down the line? What guarantees can you give players at this stage?

So long as I'm at the company, I'll do everything I can to prevent that from happening. It's hard to predict, for example, will Wildcard always be around? Hopefully, but short of it being the company that I'm at, that I have any influence over, it's important to me. I wouldn't want to see what sort of hell was unleashed, should these worlds that people have built disappear. I don't think it'd be pretty. 

That's about as extreme as I can say: I think it would mean the end of what Ark is in its current form for that to happen. I think that would be very bad for all involved. I think, short of something very extreme happening to the company, it's certainly not in the game plan for any live operational status for Ark: Survival Evolved. 

Part of the thing about Ark is it's not a standard MMO where you grind out loot, it's a creative game. People build structures, draw paintings, breed dinosaurs, they paint them too—you do all these things, you'll spend all this creative output inside the game world, that's kind of irreplaceable. Until someone destroys it in the PvP environment, of course. 

Ark: Survival Evolved's full PC launch is due August 8. 

For some, Ark: Survival Evolved's recent controversial pre-full release price hike highlights the trouble with pricing Early Access games. For others, most specifically DayZ creator Dean Hall, it's "****ing OUTRAGEOUS." But wherever you stand with the issue, the open world dino hunter's Jeremy Stieglitz has explained the premature increase is tied to the game's physical launch. 

"Admittedly, my intent, our intent, was to have the price hit the full retail price when the full retail launch occurred," Stieglitz, the game's lead designer, lead programmer and co-creative director, tells me. "That would have been at the retail launch, not prior to that. The reality turned out to be, and we didn't realise this until we got to the final phase of getting the game into retail channels, was that: in order to get the game into retailers—that is not digital retailers but physical ones, both for the physical disc PC version and the console version—the retailers and distributors wouldn't take it if the digital versions was cheaper than the retail version. They found that it would undermine their sales potential."

Stieglitz goes on to say the markup in turn couldn't wait because retailers wouldn't take the game if they weren't able to run a preorder programme. He suggests these two outcomes in tandem "forced" the studio's hand, and while unhappy with having to hike the game's price prior to its proposed August 8 PC launch feels that "the value is there, for the most part, of that price point."

Stieglitz continues: "[The value] certainly will be there at the date of retail launch—that means you buy it now for $60, for example, in three weeks it's going to be $60. It would've been $60 in three weeks anyway and we wouldn't release a game that we didn't feel was worth that. We're really confident that there's a hell of a lot of value in that package—content, features and fun gameplay.

"It is unfortunate and was absolutely not our original intent and not something I wanted personally, to have that price hike occur prior to the retail launch. I can certainly understand why that ruffled feathers and pissed people off, to be blunt, and I can only say that sometimes we as a developer can't control the variables. You might say, well, we didn't have to do it and that's true but then we wouldn't be able to have a physical retail launch.

"I think, ultimately, that's important to me personally—not from a money standpoint but from a vanity standpoint. But also it's important for Ark to be able to reach players in the non-digital community, in the physical gaming community. There really is half the market, these people who buy games in stores worldwide and we do feel that from a playerbase standpoint, those new players are going to add a lot of fun to existing Ark players as well.

"Given it was close to launch we decided to bite the bullet on it. Was it the right decision? I can't say but it was motivated by the need to get the game on store shelves and our hand was ultimately forced from that standpoint."

Ark: Survival Evolved will launch in full on PC on August 8, 2017. 

Game pricing is a thorny question that we’ve taken a crack at before, but this week we’re dealing with two considerably thornier questions: how much should an Early Access game cost, and should that cost increase when it officially launches?

Last week, Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard announced that its dinosaur survival game was getting a price increase on Steam from $30 to $60 (or £23 to £50) “to ensure retail parity” (match the price of the console versions) ahead of the game’s August launch. Many are less than pleased with the price hike. 

Some Ark fans suggest that, given ongoing bugs and server issues, the game isn’t worth $60. Some who’ve held off on purchasing the game are unwilling to pay double the Early Access price. DayZ creator and Ark fan Dean Hall called the increase “greed—pure and simple” in a series of scathing tweets, and a troubling sign that Wildcard is disconnected from its community in a follow-up interview.  

There’s a lot to unpack here, so we reached out to several prominent Early Access developers to hear their take on how Early Access games should be priced. 

What price is right?

Many Early Access games see a small price increase when they officially launch. Red Hook Studios’ Darkest Dungeon, for example, was bumped from $20 to $25 upon exiting Early Access. So it’s no surprise that Tyler Sigman, co-founder and design director at Red Hook, supports the general idea. 

“A price increase coming out of Early Access makes a lot of sense to me,” Sigman said via email. “As far as I’m concerned, as the developer you want to reward early adopters the best that you can. After all, early adopters who took an early risk got a discount and were able to take part in influencing the game. That’s real value for people to buy into Early Access.”

In this sense, a launch price increase serves as an incentive to buy early, and a reward for those who do. You could also argue it acts as a testament to a game’s completion, a concrete way for developers to tell would-be buyers that they’ve fixed all the problems from Early Access and the game is now worth more. 

Mark Morris, managing director at Introversion Software, which released Prison Architect via Early Access, offered another perspective. “I think that when you first price a game, even in Early Access, you anchor it to a particular price point,” Morris said via email. “Significant increases are always going to be perceived as a problem … if I’m being honest, I think that a doubling of the price is a pretty bitter pill to swallow—I’m not sure it’s something I would be comfortable doing!” 

So, why did Ark cause such a stink? The first factor is the amount of its price increase. Darkest Dungeon raised its price by $5 upon exiting Early Access. Kerbal Space Program went up $10. Invisible, Inc. went up $4. Viscera Cleanup Detail went up $3. Ark has jumped a full $30. That’s a huge difference, enough that it can seem like Ark isn’t just rewarding early adopters, but severely punishing people who, for one reason or another, chose to wait to buy an unfinished game. 

Another factor is timing. Ark will remain in Early Access for several more weeks, so it’s strange for Wildcard to raise the price now. It’s also telling given the studio’s explanation.To ensure “retail parity,” Wildcard may have felt compelled to raise the price of Ark's PC version to avoid undercutting the $60 console versions.

There’s also visibility to consider. One Wildcard community manager said the studio has been planning the increase “for a while,” but many players obviously feel blindsided, which suggests a failure to communicate.

Ark’s Steam page only says “the game will be lower priced through Early Access, relative to its final full-version retail price.” Wildcard wasn’t clear about how much it was going to increase the price, and gave no specific forewarning in the weeks before the new price took effect.

Matching the market

Hugh Jeremy of Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds raises another point: games like Ark usually don’t cost $60. “Many great games on Steam are setting very low prices for huge amounts of fun,” he writes via email. “For example, PUBG at $30, Rocket League and Rust at $20. You might ‘feel like’ your game is worth $60. You might like throwing silly terms like [triple-A] around in reference to your work. Whatever, your feelings don’t matter. Suck it up. What matters is how the market feels.

“If you are at $60 delivering the same amount of fun as the next guy, who is at $20, you are going to get owned. People are going to feel like they put more value in than you gave them back. So be humble, read the market. At every stage of development, position your price both in proportion to the enjoyment your game creates, and with respect to the enjoyment provided by other games.” Sigman echoed Jeremy’s stance in a follow-up reply, adding that “$60 is a big ask unless you are [triple-A].” 

Ark is now tied for the most expensive game in Steam’s top 50 best-selling survival games, matched only by Dying Light: Enhanced Edition. Subnautica, by comparison, is $20. DayZ is $35. Rust, which is also still in Early Access, is $20. Ark is a clear outlier in the survival genre.

Ark also received a $20 DLC, the Scorched Earth expansion pack, while it was still in Early Access. That DLC is still $20, and as Dean Hall pointed out, proved highly divisive among the Ark community. It’s easy to imagine that this price hike was the final straw for players who opposed Scorched Earth. 

Unknown Worlds’ Charlie Cleveland points out that it’s Wildcard’s right to raise the price, and that it’s not too surprising given the studio’s “unorthodox” history of releasing additional content before finishing their base game. More than a sign of greed, he sees it as a function of the largely undefined standards of Early Access.

“The ‘rules’ are always changing, as Studio Wildcard is showing,” he said via email. “I think they’re smart for questioning the norm and trying something new, even if it looks a bit greedy from the outside. We will likely raise our price on release, but not this much.” 

Former DayZ developer Dean Hall published a series of tweets about the price increase of Ark: Survival evolved, which jumped from $30 to $60 a month before its planned departure from Early Access in August. In his tweets, Hall called Ark's price change "****ing OUTRAGEOUS" (asterisks his) and attributed it to "greed - pure and simple."

Hall counts himself a "huge fan" of Studio Wildcard's game. "I absolutely think the game would be worth it when it reaches a stable state," he said in another tweet. "Emphasis on the last few words!" In other replies on Twitter, Hall said that Ark is "nowhere near close" to being finished, calling the dinosaur survival game "very buggy."

DayZ, which Hall began developing in 2012, entered Steam Early Access in December of 2013, and four years later it is now preparing to enter beta. Hall left Bohemia Interactive in 2014 to found a new game studio, RocketWerkz. 

We asked Hall via email what Ark needs to do to justify its $60 price, what effect Studio Wildcard's decision to release paid DLC had, and how developers determine the appropriate price when they're transitioning from Early Access to a full release.

PC Gamer: As a fan of the game, what does Ark need to do to justify that $60 price point?

Dean Hall: I put a pretty high expectation on a "AAA" price. Many focus obsessively on how long a game is in early access  but I would far rather a game take as long as it needs in Early Access to be bug free rather than a rushed development and then a rushed price increase. I believe Ark, like DayZ or any other Early Access game, should remain in Early Access until it achieves the expected performance and bug standards of it's price.

I play the game exclusively on permadeath so the bugs killing you are just so much harsher for me!

How does Wildcard's decision to release a paid expansion in 2016 change this price increase?

I think that DLC split the community which is the main reason I wasn't a fan of it. I had many friends who would play Ark with us, but not into it enough to buy the DLC. It's always a risk with DLC in a multiplayer title. As I say below, I think that decision is symptomatic of how successful they are and that those making the pricing decisions don't care about the state of the game.

How does a developer determine what's the appropriate price increase when they're transitioning from Early Access to a full release?

As Garry Newman pointed out in a tweet to me: they're doing something right! Ark has been incredibly successful and this decision will not undermine that in the least. So you could argue they can set whatever price they want. But as a consumer myself, I think it's symptomatic that those making the price decisions don't care about the state of the game and just want to get into boxed retail as quickly as possible.

So, it's not so much the price that worries me. But those making the pricing decisions seem so disconnected from the development. It seems to me, that the release of Early Access is fairly arbitrary and being driven around the desire to have boxed sets on shelves—rather than actually having a relatively bug-free and balanced game.

Anything else you'd like to add?

There is a general obsession with gamers about how long a game is in Early Access. We should be encouraging games to stay in Early Access until they are finished, not accepting games leaving Early Access because the developer wants to put retail boxes on shelves. The standard that I hold a game up to is not how long it took to get to the finish line, but where the finish line was drawn and how much it charged to get there.

If you've been on the fence as to whether or not to purchase Studio Wildcard's dinosaur survival game, you've officially missed your window to get in on Early Access pricing. Ark: Survival Evolved is now $59.99 in the Steam store, "to ensure retail parity" for the game's full launch in August, according to Ark's official twitter account.

Ark, in Early Access since 2015, has been priced at $29.99 on Steam, and has featured a number of sales that have dropped it as low as $10 at times. However, as its Steam page warned: "... the game will be lower priced through Early Access, relative to its final full-version retail price." That full-version price arrived for consoles a few weeks ago, and while we haven't quite at reached the August 8 release date, Ark is now full price on PC as well.

If you bought Ark prior to today, naturally, you don't need to sweat the price increase: you'll own the full game when it leaves Early Access.

Amidst the hustle, bustle, and blinding chaos of E3, Studio Wildcard has very quietly announced a big bit of Ark: Survival Evolved news: A release date of August 8, worldwide and across all platforms. 

"During the past two years, millions of Ark players have built gigantic bases, captured and trained armies of dinosaurs, crafted armories full of weapons and eaten billions of pounds of Jurassic creature-kabobs. With their help, we’re about to reach the completion of core content for Ark: Survival Evolved and release the full game to the world," studio co-founder and co-creative director Jeremy Stieglitz said. 

"For those players who were excited with every update during Early Access, Ark’s going to become even more fun with surprise new content at launch & beyond, as we will continue to have a staggering amount of additional gameplay, creatures, and story elements in the works." 

Studio Wildcard also announced that the modder-made map Ragnarok is being released today on Steam as the game's first official expansion, and also the first mod to be integrated into Ark through the sponsored mod program. The new map will feature: 

• A 144 sq kilometer map designed to be explored by land, sea or air
• Tons of harvest-able or gatherable resources
• Caves of all shapes and sizes, each designed to be built in
• Distinct variations on former ARK creatures, as well a special brand-new creature unique to Ragnarok
• Build tree platforms on unique trees/rocks
• Expansive biomes that were built to reward hardy explorers
• Some of the most challenging dungeons in ARK will await players
• An active volcano that while erupting yields a high amount of resources in the form of lava crystal
• Beautiful vistas and base locations as far as the eye can see
• Hot springs that while dormant yield a relaxing buff, but when active, become dangerous
• Ruins to not only explore but that can also be incorporated into base builds
• A vast ocean with its own ecosystem
• Upcoming future desert biome to find and tame creatures
• Upcoming Explorer Notes that hold the key to Ragnarok's secrets and history

The Ragnarok expansion is free on Steam, although Studio Wildcard warned that it "is still in primary development, and so it will continue to expand with updates over time." 

It's great to have finally a release date, although to a large extent (for those of us on PC, anyway) it's symbolic: You can just nip over to Steam and buy the thing right now—still in Early Access, mind—for $30/£23/€28.