New Steam Early Access release Ark: Survival Evolved hits $10m in revenue

Steam Early Access release Ark: Survival Evolved has sold more than 400,000 copies and generated $10m in gross revenue during its first week on Valve’s platform.

In an interview withGames Industry, Studio Wildcard co-founder Jesse Rapczak explained that the game’s current pre-release state makes it premature to call the game profitable.

"It’s too early to talk about profit since we still have a game to make and there are plenty of costs associated with all of that, but the revenue from sales has already paid for the $1.5 million cost of development over the past seven months," Rapczak said.

He added that 80 per cent of the game is complete, with hundreds of hours of gameplay already in place.

"It’s just down to balancing and feedback from the players. If all goes well we may even add more content once the community gets their hands on the mod tools. More on that later.”

Rapczak also mentioned that the full release will pack VR support for its current Windows PC version and on PS4 as well.

"We already have an early implementation of VR support in the game today with Oculus Rift. Considering my background with HoloLens I am very excited about this and it is one of the areas we will be improving on throughout Early Access. Our plan is to ship VR on PC and PS4 with Project Morpheus," he noted.

Ark: Survival Evolved is expected to officially launch in June 2016.