Indie developer Studio Wildcard has done a lot of things differently. The Seattle-based start-up self-funded ARK: Survival Evolved for $2 million using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 and got the game into Steam Early Access last June. Since then, the game has grossed $150 million and has remained in the top-five bestselling games on Steam. And that’s been done with no downloadable content.
“We purposely wanted to get the game out before Jurassic World hit theaters last summer, and that definitely helped us get the word out in the early days,” said Jesse Rapczak, co-founder and co-creative director at Studio Wildcard. “People love dinosaurs and there’s never been a game that lets you play with dinosaurs like ARK does. You can play a dinosaur shooter or a dinosaur simulation game, or none of them. Not unlike Minecraft, people are learning different ways to play ARK with dinosaurs.”
The ARK community has steadily increased from an average of 40,000 concurrent players a year ago to an average of 55,000 concurrent players today on Steam. Peak concurrent users between Xbox One and PC have exceeded 130,000 users at times.
While the company has been focusing on finishing the final version of the game, it’s also grown from 12 to 25 employees. And the studio has stepped into eSports through a separate mod version of the game, Survival of the Fittest, which has taken off on its own.
“ARK originally didn’t have a competitive mode other than player-versus-player,” Rapczak said. “There wasn’t a short, time-scaled competitive mode until Survival of the Fittest, which introduced a Hunger Games-type competition. We created that mode as an example for the mod kit community, so other people in community could create other stuff.”
While the PC community has created over 4,000 mods, Wildcard ended up with a separate fan base through the stand-alone, free-to-play game that pits up to 72 players in a “last man standing” setting. Earlier this year, Wildcard launched the Survival League, which is based on rankings and cash prizes. The company recently flew the top eight teams from around the globe to compete in the $40,000 Summer Cup in China, which took place during ChinaJoy.
The competition spanned two days and was livestreamed on Twitch. Wildcard flew in top shoutcasters for the event and had support from local Chinese partners as well Reverb Communications.
Rapczak hopes to do future competitions at ChinaJoy, and his company is currently looking at TwitchCon as another prime show to host a Cup around.
“Seeing giant dinosaurs chasing people around is entertaining even if you don’t know all the rules,” Rapczak said.
ESports is on-going for the game through monthly tournaments with cash prizes. This Saturday, the July Survivor League Championship pits the top ranking ARK: Survival of the Fittest teams in each of three game modes against each other for more than $65,000 in prizes.
To date, the big established eSports teams haven’t made the move to ARK yet.
“We want those teams to come over and play ARK, but we haven’t seen a big influx from those teams yet,” Rapczak said. “The audience isn’t there yet in terms of the number of people playing the tournament rankings. We have a spectator mode and the ability for team identity to carry though tournaments.”
Rapczak said Wildcard is looking at new things to get players into the game like more maps, more tournament modes.
“A lot of players have requested more structure,” Rapczak said. “Having monthly finalists moving on to the next stage has been working. We could have more structured tournament mods and automated rules, where you win and move on to the next. We’re thinking about the Winter Cup now.”
Wildcard is also launching a paid mod contest targeting eSports next month.
“We want the community to come up with mods for eSports that include great new ways to play the game that might attract new players,” Rapczak said. “It will be our third mod contest. We usually give away $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 for the top three mod winners. In a way, the contest is an eSport in itself.”
Rapczak said the studio found in developing Survival of Fittest that they got the best feedback from the players themselves in terms of changes in the way the game plays and balances, opening up new strategies, and making the competition more fierce.
“We’re opening it up to community to let them do more things with the content and see where the eSports mode of ARK is going from here,” Rapczak said. “Our central team is working on finishing Survival Evolved.”
In order to focus on the main game, Wildcard has brought Survival of the Fittest back into the paid fold. Anyone who owns the free-to-play mod previously can continue to play it, but new gamers will need to purchase ARK: Survival Evolved to receive the eSports mode. This also allows gamers to mod the Survival of the Fittest for the first time.
“Going forward, we want players to have the tools to change things around,” Rapczak said. “With this mod contest we’ll see what happens with new things we want to do around the console release.
ARK: Survival Evolved will launch this winter across all platforms. Rapczak said his team is launching new content over the next month and getting the final features into the game.
“We’re looking at the final phases of bug fixing and polish,” Rapczak said. “We’re looking at both digital download as well as a retail launch.”