The huge gaming failure no one is talking about

CanPanther

In Dec. 2015, Snail Games bought Studio Wildcard, and thus Ark: Survival Evolved, and tried to use the investment to enter the NA/European PC market in a big way. Over the next 3.5 years, they introduced 6 survival games based on Ark's code, and every single one has pretty much failed. All of them were based on popular video games/themes turned into survival games: 

Dark and Light - July 2017 - LOTR
ArkPark - Mar. 2018 - Jurassic Park
PixArk - Mar. 2018 - Minecraft
Atlas - Dec. 2018 - Pirates
Fear the Night - Dec. 2018 - DayZ
Outlaws of the Old West - Mar. 2019 - RDR

Three of the 6 have apparently already been abandoned (ArkPark, Fear the Night, Outlaws of the Old West). The dev team behind OotOW even stated publicly that Snail refused to fund it anymore and they had to use their own money to continue developing it. Of these 3 titles, only OotOW got above an average of 100 players per day (max. 412), with both of the others rarely cracking double digits after their EA launch. There were no public announcements from Snail about the lack of continuing development for any of these 3 titles. 

DnL hasn't seen a bugfix since Sept. 2019 and its NA dev team was shut down sometime shortly after. The title is now being developed as a mobile game by a Chinese studio belonging to Snail and a beta is expected at the end of Feb. this year. There has been no word from Snail Games to the players about the PC version's future, though there are rumours that the new mobile version will be ported to PC. Player levels for DnL have been hovering around an average of 200-300 per day since the release of its only DLC in Oct. 2018, when it managed to hit a high of 1246. 

Pixark, while still being supported, is also at the same player levels as DnL, hitting a high mark of 509.4 once since its EA release. Atlas has been the most successful of the 6 games, now hovering around an average of 2-4k players per day, with dips down as low as 1400 between update releases. All 6 of these games are still available for purchase on Steam, even the ones suspected of abandonment. 

It must have cost Snail multiple millions to attempt this kind of mass game development, and it was all for naught. It is surprising that game media sites have not picked up on this news as of yet. 

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Reference: Developers of OotOW lose their publisher, Snail Games:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/JamieVB/

Jamie - Virtual Basement 11 Oct, 2020 @ 1:29pm 

haha no, we very much didn't do that. We (virtual basement), have sunk so much of our OWN money into keeping Outlaws afloat and continuing development. If we wanted to just take money and run we would have never spent any time working on the game after our publisher stopped funding development.

All player level figures courtesy of https://steamcharts.com

Dibdabs

Maybe, like me, the game media sites don't care one way or the other.

Theocritus

I have noticed alot of survival games on Steam...maybe the market is just too flooded and only the strong will survive?

KnightFalz

It's been talked about. Perhaps nobody cares to discuss it further. Snail will likely recover all they spent and more besides in the mobile market anyway, so whatever losses they incurred probably won't generate much in the way of new conversation either.

cheyane

The mobile will take off like a rocket and they will recuperate their losses. Mobile seems to be the way to go since its market has no standards and they gobble anything, much like gully dwarves. Hate mobile with a passion because it has ate into the budget for PC games. Hate !@! Hate$%^

Quizzical

Theocritus said:

I have noticed alot of survival games on Steam...maybe the market is just too flooded and only the strong will survive?

It makes a lot of sense for survival games themselves to have difficulty surviving, don't you think?

Kyleran

Snail rhymes with fail, need I say more?

BruceYee

Not sure if they were failures in terms of $ loss though cause we don't know how much they cost to develop. Player numbers also don't tell us how many people actually purchased the game cause some buy them and let them sit in their library forever.

West, Pixark I believe were either $19.99 or $14.99 at launch and D&L I think was $29.99?

If they are still up on Steam maybe people still buy them when they go on sale so that's more money being made with no dev cost being paid out.

Their games always made my systems run very hot probably due to poor code so I never played them very long.

Wizardry

I have talked about it several times and imo there is even a much bigger story to the whole ordeal of which i have also touched on in the past.

There are some distinct similarities from Snail back in 2006 with voyage century.
Not many remember the original; Dark n Light and even when i tried google for answers i think i uncovered one article from many hours of searching.

There was a claim the DnL world builder was stolen and subsequently shut down by courts.That world builder was very similar to the wprld builder used in Ark/Atlas/OOTOW etc etc.

How does it all tie together?Well i fidn it odd that over the course of Voyage Century a lot of that design was carried over into Atlas for example.
BTW SNail did not yet own the rights or acquire the rights to DnL but i found iot odd the very close similarities,so who really owned the original Dnl?

All of these businesses run subsidiaries and try to hive behind fake businesses and publishers that they created.One fail does not affect the other LLC's so you can see how a system like that can be manipulated to turn profits from nothing and just let the others rot and die.

Long winded point is this did not start with Ark,it started with DnL many years ago and Snail just might have had a part in it even way back then because i am pretty sure it was around 2003-7 era when DnL was around.

How does Snail make money?Well once you have a TEMPLATE you  can just insert new texture/skin and use the template over and over with very little effort.They can even use th esame skeletal mesh/rigging over and over and again just change the skin.The building blocks can again just use a different face/texture so on and so on so a new game can built as fast as the artists can make skins/textures.

MMOExposed

the issue is that these games have no long term aspect for consumers. 

Theocritus

MMOExposed said:

the issue is that these games have no long term aspect for consumers. 

What about a game like Fortnite then? You see everything it has to offer in about 15 minutes yet it is going strong as ever.......No character building, no levels, just buy dance moves and costumes in the cash shop and everyone is as happy as can be.....

Dibdabs

Jean-Luc_Picard said:

You guys want a good survival game ?

Check out "Valheim" on Steam !

@MMORPG it's a shame you don't have an entry for that game on the site !

There were 390,000+ players on last night and a couple of thousand more would have hit the 400,000 mark.

As in all EA games the numbers will fall after a while but it's a lot of fun, plus it's free of bugs, which is a first for me in EA games.  People will inevitably rush through the content and moan there's nothing left to do, but the roadmap is there for 2021.  The Dev team is only 4 or 5 people, and yet they have sold 1 million copies of the game.

No hand-holding, pretty steep curve, which I like, and I'm 75 hours into the game. 

EDIT:  Just thought I'd add that the game only costs £15.49 ($20), is a mere 500Mb download which installs into a 1Gb game folder.  The voxel-based low poly graphics works well and of course it means Valheim isn't boated out with 30Gb to 40Gb of the shiny graphics many gamers seem to insist on.  It has procedurally-generated worlds, single to 10 player co-op, building, crafting (this is the ONLY game where I like crafting!), boats, exploration and resource-gathering. More content coming.