Ark: Survival Ascended, a remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved, has reached a new milestone shortly after its Early Access launch on Steam. The developers are now working on console versions of the game
On November 17, publisher Snail Inc. announced that Ark had already sold over 600,000 copies globally in its first two weeks.
During its launch day, October 26, it also became one of the top 6 games on Twitch with over 5.6 million minutes watched. Snail expects Ark: Survival Ascended to “continue to captivate broader audiences worldwide.”
Upon its Steam release, the game became the highest-grossing premium title on the platform for the week of October 24-31. However, it fell eight places next week, with players still complaining about its current state in terms of bugs, poor optimization, and lack of content.
At the moment of writing, Ark: Survival Ascended has a “Mixed” rating on Steam, with 56% of more than 26,000 user reviews being positive. According to SteamDB, the game peaked at 98,047 concurrent players. For comparison, Ark: Survival Evolved has the peak CCU of neary 250,000 and an 83% rating based on over 500,000 reviews.
Survival Ascended is branded as the next-gen remastered version of the original game thanks to its transition to Unreal Engine 5 and some quality-of-life improvements. Studio Wildcard plans to further support and develop the title and then eventually focus on the full-fledged sequel, ARK 2, that is expected to launch in 2024.
Earlier this week, the developers once again delayed the Xbox version of Survival Ascended because the “certification process has yielded some unexpected issues.” It should come out next week, and the PlayStation version is still on track to launch by the end of the month.