Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard has some bad news, but also some good. Let's get the bad out of the way first: The process of prepping the game for retail release took longer than expected, and so the planned launch date of August 8, which the studio announced back in June, has been pushed to August 29.   

"We're deeply apologetic for those who were negatively affected by the delay; it sucks, it wasn't what we had wanted, nor planned but where we currently stand," the studio explained in a weekend update. "We wanted to address this sooner but did not want to make any statements until we were completely sure of what was going to happen." 

The delay also impacts the release of a planned update for the Ragnarok expansion map, which Studio Wildcard said is actually the upside to the whole thing. "This extended time will allow further development of the map and you guys can expect a gigantic update, even bigger than we initially thought," it explained. "On the date of release, the overground of the world will increase by approximately one quarter, which is near-enough a 'TheIsland-sized' expansion; the update will feature new biomes, a coastal Wyvern canyon, an epic boss encounter, new engrams, and something secret the Ragnarok team are cooking up!" 

Beyond that, the studio's focus will be on improving the performance of the game on PC and addressing specific issues like multiplayer bosses ("They're ridiculous, we know why and we're going to fix it"), the "Baby-to-Juvie Stasis issue" that prevents infant creatures from maturing properly, and stopping "jerks" from going under the map and raiding people. A major version update that will "significantly assist with DDoS mitigation, resolve the exploit which has allowed players to dupe, and ... allow players to rent PC-dedicated Console Servers" is also slated for the middle of August. 

In February, Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard unveiled a sponsored programme that would pay mod creators on a monthly basis for their work. Offering a stipend of $4,000 per month, each individual's work would be evaluated, and it would thereafter be determined if those modders would continue to be paid for the next month. 

With the dino hunter's August 8 PC release looming, however, not much has been said about the programme since—its Ragnarok map has been received well, however we don't know much about what happens next. To this end, I spoke to the developer's Jesse Stieglitz about how he and his team plan to grow the initiative post-launch. 

"We've not dedicated all that much time to promoting it, maybe not as much as we'd have liked to, however that's probably because we've been focused on shaping things up for our retail launch," says Stieglitz. "But we recently put out our next official mod called Ragnarok with a mod team that's now officially supported and we'll continue to have servers up for it and we'll have updates and more polished applied. 

"They basically get not only money from us but they get development support from us and that's probably more valuable to them because we help them shape it up technically and artistically and creatively."

Stieglitz suggests the sponsored community maps will only get bigger and better from hereon, and that the Ragnarok team are among the best level designers he's seen. Development on Ragnarok will continue till completion, and Wildcard plans to launch "at least" one more official DLC this year, with Stieglitz hopefully of a second. 

He continues: "Essentially the official mods, or paid mods pipeline is a way for us to get more free art content to players. We can only do so much ourselves so we look at best of what the mod community has to offer and how can we help them make their content better than it already is—whether it's financial support, but also a lot of the things it's logistics or technical support. There will be others and we use this as a kind of seeding programme to find the next ones. We'll hopefully have more to announce there going forward."

Ark: Survival Evolved is due to launch in full August 8, 2017. 

"Ark: Survival of the Fittest was for us an experiment," says Studio Wildcard's co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz. "It started as a mod and it was pretty cool and pretty fun. I lot of these games that are very successful—like PUBG, like, you know, Counter-Strike or DotA—originate as mods and can switch over to standalone titles."

Having begun life as a mod, Ark: Survival of the Fittest became a free-to-play standalone game in early 2016. As a promising battle royale-type venture—in a world prior to the likes of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds—it failed to take off and was later "reintegrated" into the main Survival Evolved game.  

According to Steam Spy's data, less than 300 people played Ark: Survival of the Fittest concurrently yesterday—whereas over 350,000 took to the wargrounds of PUBG simultaneously. Given the unexpected, astronomical success of Brendan Greene's similarly styled battle royale game, I asked Stieglitz where he thinks SotF went wrong, and whether or not Studio Wildcard will revisit it down the line.   

"We thought Survival of the Fittest would have that potential based on the fact that it was a pretty fun mod and there were a decent number of players. It never quite caught on as a standalone, even as a free-to-play which of course means it should larger numbers of players," Stieglitz explains. "We didn't want to charge something like that anyway—it's not our intent to charge for that kind of game and also, frankly, our primary priority was and is developing Ark: Survival Evolved. 

"It was an experiment that didn't catch on but we do think there's a fun game there. We've debated many times why it didn't quite hit the sweet spot when similar games—you might call them arena survival games, of some sort—have really taken off. Especially recently with PlayerUnknown's game and also [H1Z1] King of the Kill."

Stieglitz says he's unsure of where Survival of the Fittest fits into today's landscape, but that a lack of resources have prevented he and his team from reinvigorating the game as it stands. Stieglitz suggests the fact SotF's slow-paced, complex and hour-long battles mean its hard for players to drop in and out in the same way they can in PUBG—but the fact Ark includes dinosaurs is nevertheless appealing to the battle royale genre. 

He continues: "I don't know it'd be as big as PlayerUnknown's title, but I think dinosaurs are very agreeable to a general audience and they're cool in a PvP environment. Everybody understands how powerful a T-Rex is compared to, say, a rapture. That's a very intuitive thing—it's a good spectator game in fact. However, it really comes down to focus right now. We're a very small team relative to what we try to do - we've got about 30-some people in our core team—and it's difficult for us to develop Ark: Survival Evolved and Survival of the Fittest at the same time. 

"Honestly, I guess we'll have to see. Once Ark: Survival Evolved's core game is out the door in August, even then we're going to want to see what we can do with the mechanics. We plan many core gameplay updates for the foreseeable future. If somewhere in there we can find a group of people, however, who would want to take SotF forward, we probably would be interested in working something out."

Stieglitz notes that the team originally working on Survival of the Fittest were better versed in the technical side of the game as opposed to design. He admits Studio Wildcards has "toyed" with the idea of revisiting it, but that it's most likely to be kickstarted if they find the right developer externally, or if that developer finds them.  

"If we were to revisit it, we have to do so and ask: do we rebuilt it entirely or do we find a team that can take it forward," Stieglitz adds. "That's what it really comes down to: it's not that I don't think there's a good idea there, I do, but someone's got to actually make it. And we're a little too small to make it at the same time as Ark: Survival Evolved. 

"I certainly like Survival of the Fittest and I would hate to see nothing else come of it. My ability to predict the future is obviously pretty bad. Anything could happen I guess I could say."

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.”