ARK: Survival Evolved is (technically) already bigger on Xbox than PC

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Excuse me while I go all "Route-One Internet" on your myriad asses, but there's really only one way to begin here:

So, ARK: Survival Evolved - the wildly popular, dinosaur-flavoured survival game - already has a higher daily player count on Xbox One than on PC (where, let's remember, it was Steam's number one game). In under a week after release, the game had been downloaded over a million times through the Xbox Game Preview service, the console's early access programme.

Now, it's worth remembering that all Xbox Game Preview titles come with a free trial, so those aren't necessarily sales figures, nor is that player count likely to stay as high, but they'd be encouraging stats for any developer, never mind an indie studio with its debut game. Props.

This information comes from creative director Jesse Rapczak - speaking through the Xbox Wire blog - who puts the game's success down to the flood of survival games on PC as opposed to consoles' relative trickle. It should also mean that the console version gets due care and attention - while we know that the PC version will receive updates first, you can bet that with a big audience waiting for new stuff to murder with/at, we should find it comes rather swiftly.

Rapczak promises "regular updates about every two weeks" - and there's a lot already planned. "This will eventually include highly-demanded features like split screen support, gamepad customization, UI improvements, tweaks to current game modes, balancing improvements and all the new content that is going into the PC version."

By the way, that next bit of content is a giant, rideable prehistoric species of Kangaroo. It might be worth giving that free trial a spin.

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Joe Skrebels
Joe Skrebels
Joe first fell in love with games when a copy of The Lion King on SNES became his stepfather in 1994. When the cartridge left his mother in 2001, he turned to his priest - a limited edition crystal Xbox - for guidance. And now he's here.