Steam players shocked by insane file size of Ark Survival Evolved
Studio WildcardSteam players have been revisiting their libraries over the festive season, as many have chosen to avoid re-installing the original Ark Survival Evolved game over its enormous file size.
Ark Survival Evolved has proved to have a loyal following since the action-adventure survival game first released all the way back in 2015.
Despite it being criticized for having various bugs and improvements needed since launch, the developers continued to provide further updates and various DLC expansions over the years.
Since then, the developers released a next-generation remaster of the game on October 25, 2023, titled Ark Survival Ascended, and have officially announced Ark 2 is coming, but has no release date.
However, with it being the festive holiday season and the remaster costing around $40 on Steam, PC players who already own the original game in their libraries looked to revisit the game, before instantly avoiding it over its massive file size to install.
Steam players avoid Ark Survival Evolved over huge file size
Steam player BlacklogGamingJunkie revealed they would be avoiding it on Reddit: “Wanted to revisit this game but then saw its install size!”
After reviewing their library, the player said they “didn’t remember it was this large,” and showed a Steam screenshot which stated the space required needed to install Ark: Survival Evolved was 329 GB.
This is a stark difference to the remastered release of Survival Ascended, which according to Steam requires just 70 GB. Many were in disbelief and flooded the comments to suggest the reasons why.
Many players put the reason down to all content added over the years, “Its the expansions. Each one adds a map and the maps are huge. I’d bet the base game with the first map probably was around 60 GB.”
While others blamed the developers: “Devs are just really lazy with versioning, so they keep all the old unused sh*t.” As another called it “the least optimized game of all time.”
With Ark having continuous updates and DLC expansion packs over nearly a decade and set among expansive worlds, it is no surprise that the game has racked up a considerable file size. Despite this, it is considerably larger than most games across Steam.