Sony and Microsoft shelled out millions to get ARK: Survival Evolved on PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass

ARK: Survival Evolved is in both Sony and Microsoft’s subscription service game catalogs, and that’s because both companies were willing to spend a lot of money.

To get the game on their respective services, Sony paid $3.5 million and Microsoft paid $2.5 million, as indicated in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by Snail Games USA, the owner of the ARK’s developer, Studio Wildcard. Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach broke down the deals and their peculiarities on Twitter.

The document states a $3.5 million agreement with Sony to make ARK: Survival Evolved available in March 2022 PlayStation Plus games for PS4 during the period from March 1 to April 4. There was a previous agreement with Microsoft to make the game available on Xbox Game Pass since 2019, which was supposed to end in 2021 before being extended in June 2020 so that the game could forever remain in the catalog for a value of $2.5 million.

In addition to the ARK extension for Game Pass, Microsoft also included in the deal the launch of ARK 2 for Xbox Series X/S and PC on the service for three years from its launch.

While it is true that Microsoft paid a million dollars less than Sony, PlayStation Plus games could be redeemed by players to remain in their libraries indefinitely, a very different service from the Game Pass proposal.

Platform companies such as Sony and Microsoft do not have the habit of indicating the amounts spent on their transactions to make games available on their services, which is partially why these numbers are interesting to so many fans.

The same document also features several issues about ARK: Survival Evolved. As of June 30, 2022, the game has had 76.5 million installs on consoles and PC since its launch, with 33.3 million copies sold and 38.4 million copies downloaded in subscriptions or sales. It had 395,150 daily active players on Steam and the Epic Games Store during the first half of 2022 and peaked in June of the same year, with 755,000 users.

Despite having a net loss of $15.2 million in 2019, the company earned $29.8 million in 2020 and $7.9 million in 2021.

ARK: Survival Evolved is available now for mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One. And ARK 2 is scheduled for 2023, still without a set date, exclusively for Xbox Series X|S and PC.