ARK: Survival Evolved Best Selling Game on PSN for Dec and Jan, Surpasses 1 Million Sales on PS4

Studio Wildcard’s PS4 port for ARK Survival Evolved has been doing rather well since its launch last December, with the open world adventure game surpassing 1 million sales on Sony’s home console, following its semi-release on PC and Xbox One.

[IamTylerDurden1]

Ark is a hit on PSN. I'm actually quite surprised considering the steep asking price.

[Resis7ance]

A little surprised to see ARK doing so nicely on PS4, especially seeing as it outsold Resident Evil 7 and The Last Guardian on PSN

[phantomexe]

Great game but i'm still not happy with how long it took to hit ps4. Get a proper early access sony and take away MS life support. So many ppl i know purchased an xbox1 just to play it. It's sad but true. Early access sony fix it.

[slate91]

Its sad that people bought something they want to play? Why are you into this hobby again?

[phantomexe]

It's sad they had to purchase a second consule for this one 3rd party indy game. I just waited but we wouldn't of needed to had there been an early access. They purchased a xbox for this not gears or halo. You following now? The point is ark moved xboxs and sony could of pevented it being there for the most part on ps4. Ps4 ark now

[Eidolon]

Wow, very surprising to me, good concept but the game itself is far from complete, it has enough content but just runs bad for me, I guess I shouldn't have bought an early access game and expected it to be amazing like some of my online friends SWORE it would.

[opinionated]

I didn't even realize it came out on PS4, I was waiting for it. It will have wait a little longer. I have yakuza, nioh, for honor and horizon coming next week. Then nier, injustice 2 and my most hyped right now Prey. I'm kinda hoping for a summer drought this year to catch up on things like ark, that's nuts.

[_-EDMIX-_]

Agreed the game looks very interesting and I've had my eye on this game on Steam for a while which I'm likely to just start playing it on PlayStation 4 but there's just so many games that I might have to put it on hold until summer.

[Elwenil]

TLDR: The game is lots of fun but is equally frustrating with a developer who cares more about new content to draw in more buyers than fixing game breaking issues with the game.

Waiting on Ark is not a bad idea as it still has a lot of wrinkles. It is still an early access game on Steam but is being sold on the PS Store as a full game with no mention of it's incomplete status. The fact that they have already put DLC on the market is also a little disturbing considering how much work the game needs. Crashes and disconnects are still pretty frequent and these are pretty game breaking considering the servers are persistent and the game keeps going and your character simply falls unconscious where you disconnect. If you are 200' in the air flying when you disconnect, you can expect to be dead when you come back, meaning you respawn hopefully at a bed you have placed somewhere nearby or you respawn at on of the random spawn locations. You have a short time to locate your body or backpack to retrieve any weapons, armor and/or gear you had on you. If you don't find it in time, it all despawns and is lost. That new weapon or piece of armor you finally farmed the materials to make or lucked out and pulled out of a drop? Gone forever. Your bird? It's most likely hovering at whatever altitude it was at when you disconnected unable to be called down or retrieved unless you have a way to get back up there to whistle it to follow you. Sometimes they will drift to the ground and land, but this means they might get killed by a random wild dino in the area. Again, if you don't get to it's body in time, that saddle you worked so hard to fabricate? Gone forever.

Keep in mind that until you reach a certain point in the game, you have no way of finding lost gear or dinos. Once you get high enough in level you can make a tracking beacon to put on dinos and use a transponder to find them but they are expensive to make and are decently high level. Even then, there is no easy way to find your body or backpack which is where are your gear is. A little brown backpack is very hard to find in a lot of locations on the map due to the trees ground cover or water. If you are a long distance away from a spawn point or don't know the map well enough to know where you are based off of landmarks, you may as well consider your gear lost.

Continued below...

[Elwenil]

I always joked about the game with my friends about the survival aspect. I frequently said that you not only have to survive against the dinos, you have to survive against the elements, other marauding players (even in PvE), you battle starvation, sickness, and, most importantly, you battle the incompetence of the developer. It's a game of long periods of tense farming and gathering for resources, tense moments watching over a tame for literally hours at a time to guard it while waiting for the almighty taming bar to go up while keeping it jacked up on narcotics and then the long stressful days are ended with chaos and death and huge setbacks as you lose resources, dinos, buildings, weapons, armor, gear, rafts, etc to one of the many things that can kill you. Honestly, the most frustrating part is the disconnects.

Don't get me wrong, it's and incredibly fun game to play when things are running smoothly. Seriously, where else can you ride a T-Rex around eating other dinos and players alike? Or use your spyglass to spot an enemy or wild dino and whistle your tamed pack of Allos to tear them apart? But the game does have a lot of issues with the disconnects, the building is a horrible frustrating mess of randomly changing snap points and odd steps you need to take to get a certain result, the PvP is probably one of the more toxic modes in gaming and very hard on new players to get a foothold and progress and the fact that you can now jump from server to server means there are "alpha" tribes migrating around wreaking havoc on anything they can to the point of controlling multiple servers, ignorant and trolling tribes that use building to block spawns, lay claim to land for no purpose other than trolling and misuse of building foundations which kill resource and dino spawns, the prohibitively expensive PS4 private server deal which requires a 2nd PS4 just to run the server and a connection with enough bandwidth to handle both PS4s online at the same time in order to play on your own server, glitchy rafts, random things falling through the map, including tamed dinos, and just general foolishness of the developer wanting to create and add more content to a game that really needs more polish more than it needs more "feature creep". Seriously, what would you want more, stable servers or haircuts? I will say that if you do play Ark, DO NOT TRUST ANYONE. I mean that. Trust no one, not your friends, not "friendly" players, NO ONE. If you make that mistake, you will totally understand why I say it. ;D

[Kornholic]

It's a clear signal that people want dinosaur-themed games. There's no other possible explanation why people buy this dreg.

[Liqu1d]

People complain about games being incomplete yet they can't resist buying incomplete games.

[dauntingcookie]

Someone sell me on this game. I wanted it when it was announced 2 years ago but I am not sure with all the bugs. My wallet is ready.

[Eidolon]

Don't let anyone sell you on it, I did and I regret it. It's still very buggy, played end of January.