I think we did something like 500,000 units in the first month or something.

We did not, I think, anticipate in the first month that we would be selling so many copies considering that the game had already sold almost 10 million copies digitally. 'But the retail release all around the world has gone way better than we expected. But, in a way, the game being so successful digitally made retail almost less scary to us' 'I think, going into it, we felt it wasn't worth it because it would be a big risk. 'Because of the success of the game digitally, there was a lot of excitement from publishers and distributors about Ark, coming to us and saying, 'Hey, why isn't this game in 120 regions around the world on disc copies?' For us, we didn't really have the expertise to go do a retail release so we had to find a partner to be a distributor, since we're self-published, but we really did find a great partner in Solutions2Go,' he explains. After all, why bother with the retail scene when you can sell to so many players digitally, and at higher margins?

Jesse Rapczak, Co-Founder and Co-Creative Director at Studio Wildcard tells me, however, that retail wasn't something his studio had planned on at all originally. Perhaps one of the harder aspects for the studio came when it had to inform players that Ark's price was about to double from $30 to $60 to ensure parity with retail. All along, the Seattle-based developer had the delicate task of managing players' expectations while keenly listening to their feedback.

Until PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds came around, Studio Wildcard's dino survival game, Ark: Survival Evolved, was one of the hottest titles on Steam's Early Access, building up a community of players for over two years and then finally exiting the service for a full release just this past August.

Ark dev kit