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Clever girl.

Interesting press release from the folks over at ARK: Survival Evolved this morning. It opens up with the following statement:

Studio Wildcard is excited to announce today that its expansive survival-adventure ARK: Survival Evolved has now sold more than two million units on Steam, with more survivors joining the Jurassic journey every day.

Which is interesting, because the Steam data provided by SteamDB doesn’t have the ARK: Survival Evolved sales at quite 2 million, yet.

ARK: Survival Evolved sales figures

It’s not far away, admittedly, so perhaps Studio Wildcard are dealing with slightly more up-to-date ARK: Survival Evolved sales figures than SteamDB and its source, SteamSpy. It shows the record as last updated 12 hours ago though, and we’d be thoroughly impressed if it sold 160K copies in that time!

Also we’re not entirely sure how SteamDB sales handle Steam’s new returns policy, so that could account for some discrepancy – whether they’re subtracted from the total, or still count as an overall sale – but ‘sales + refunded sales’ isn’t an entirely glowing measure of success.

In addition to the ARK: Survival Evolved sales figures, there’s also another interesting claim in said press release:

The most popular open-world Early Access game on Steam, ARK: Survival Evolved brings a new level of depth to the survival genre with a unique blend of emergent multiplayer cooperation and competition.

Yes, you read that correctly. “The most popular open-world Early Access game on Steam,” apparently. I can’t help but feel like there’s another open-world Steam Early Access title that they’re missing…

ARK: Survival Evolved sales vs DayZ

Ah yes, that’s it: DayZ and its near 3.5 million sales to date.

Perhaps Studio Wildcard are not using the aforementioned ARK: Survival Evolved sales as the measure of it being the “most popular open-world Early Access game on Steam” – perhaps they’re using some other measure, like user ratings?

ARK: Survival Evolved user rating vs DayZ

Ah. Well, this is awkward. Maybe Studip Wildcard dispute that DayZ is an open-world game…?

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