Ark: Survival Evolved is being review-bombed over a 'free' remaster upgrade that actually costs $50

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The game's Steam page is now paying the price

Ark: Survival Evolved
(Image credit: Studio Wildcard)

Ark: Survival Evolved is being review-bombed on Steam after it was revealed the Unreal Engine 5 remaster will cost fans $50 and won't include all the DLC. 

If you head on over to the Ark: Survival Evolved Steam page, you'll notice an influx of negative reviews - many of which make reference to the recently announced Unreal Engine 5 remaster. The new version, titled Ark: Survival Ascended, will give the 2015 survival game a visual overhaul and will be bundled with Ark 2 - when it eventually releases. 

One of the main issues that players have with this upgrade is that the once-considered "free" update will actually cost you $50, and that's without the two expansion packs (Explorer’s Pass & Genesis Pass), which will cost you an additional $20 each and will release separately over the course of 2023 and 2024. 

To make things worse, when Ark: Survival Ascended releases, the developer plans to shut down the official servers for Ark: Survival Evolved - leaving players with just their own servers, and the option to switch over to the new version via save migration.

Several Reddit users, as well as those Steam reviews, have called Studio Wildcard "greedy" for charging for the upgrade and expansion packs. "Game is about to die in four months to be sold again at full price under a different title, with all of the DLCs too… What a scam," one review reads. "Game is good but what's coming is trash," another player writes.

This isn't the only bad news that Studio Wildcard had for fans recently. In the same post on the Ark Community Forums, it was revealed that Ark 2 has been pushed back to sometime in 2024 for the "betterment of the final product and the team's well-being" as well as a switch to Unreal Engine 5. 

If you're now looking for something else to play, take a look at our best survival games list.  

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Hope Bellingham
Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.  

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