With developer Studio Wildcard still working to turn around player sentiment on the recently released Ark Survival Ascended, the boss of its parent company has insisted Ark 2 is still on track for a late 2024 release window.
Speaking at the NobleCon19 business conference earlier in December, Snail Games CEO Jim Tsai confirmed Ark 2, which he described as the company’s “next masterpiece”, is due out late 2024. There was also mention of annual DLC releases to “fuel franchise growth” through to 2029.
Ark 2 is the Unreal Engine 5-powered sequel to the hugely successful Ark Survival Evolved, a dinosaur survival game that’s seen big sales on PC and console. It was first announced with a surprise Vin Diesel cameo at The Game Awards 2020, at the time with a 2022 release date, but it was later delayed into 2023. Then, earlier this year, Ark 2 was delayed again, this time to late 2024 as an Xbox Series X and S console exclusive, day-one on Game Pass, and on PC via Steam and Windows.
But we haven’t heard much on Ark 2 since. Meanwhile, Studio Wildcard released Ark 1 remake Ark Survival Ascended in October. It launched big but has drawn criticism for performance issues. The situation is so bad, that Jeremy Stieglitz, co-founder of Studio Wildcard admitted during a livestream that Ark’s servers “run like ass”.
Studio Wildcard, then, is busy sorting out Ark Survival Ascended, which carries a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam. In fact, at the time of publication, more people were playing Ark Survival Evolved on Steam than Ark Survival Ascended. The developer has a reputation within its community for delaying release dates, so there’s already a healthy degree of scepticism about Ark 2’s planned late 2024 release window. For publisher and company owner Snail Games, at least, nothing has changed.
Speaking of Snail Games, during the business conference presentation, Tsai bigged up Ark’s potential to expand beyond games into the realm of TV and movies (Ark: The Animated Series is due out at some point in 2024). There’s also word of free-to-play mobile and esports.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
