Ark: Survival Evolved hits 5.5m on PC and Xbox One

Hit PC game Ark: Survival Evolved has been downloaded 5.5m times since its June 2015 release date.

Speaking to MCV, the co-founder of developer Studio Wildcard Jeremy Stieglitz said that the Xbox One SKU, which launched in December 2015, had sold 1.5m copies alone. Therefore the PC version will have hit 4m downloads.

He added that the game’s success was unexpected considering the saturation in the survival genre. The firm has also had to drastically increase its scope for what it originally planned for the game.

[Our first year] has gone very well,” Stieglitz told us. The launch was an unexpected success, but that’s also a double edged sword because when it succeeds at that level, it kind of raises expectations about how ambitious the game is going to be, and how large of a scope it is going to have when it is finished.

We have especially blown the doors open on what we had originally planned in terms of number of creatures, features and technical complexity. When we launched we didn’t even plan on having modding support, which has become a huge aspect of the game’s appeal and life cycle on PC.

It’s been interesting to raise ourselves and our level of work to the expectations that this very large audience now has.”

Read more about Ark: Survival Evolved in next week’s MCV.