ARK: Survival Ascended
Skip · RPG · 2023 · Early Access
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $44.99.
- Length
- 276.5h
- Value
- $0.16/hr
- Reviews
- 60% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 16 GB of memory, AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, NVIDIA GeForce 1080, 180 GB of storage. Windows only.
ARK is reimagined from the ground-up into the next-generation of video game technology with Unreal Engine 5! Form a tribe, tame & breed hundreds of unique dinosaurs and primeval creatures, explore, craft, build, and fight your way to the top of the food-chain. Your new world awaits!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
February 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $11.24. It has been discounted 23 times in the 3 years tracked here, typically at 45 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 94 percent. On the same math ARK: Survival Evolved ($14.99, scores 67) and Enshrouded ($39.99, scores 67) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 15 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,416 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 676 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 28 percent of the 11,195 reviews written there were positive, against 60 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
It came out 3 years ago and 12.0K were still playing it at the last check.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
74% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
12.0K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
***Do NOT buy if you have a 512 GB drive*** The base game is 218 GB. I have a 512GB SSD and can no longer play the game because STEAM requires DOUBLE the game size to update the game. An update just dropped, and since I don't have 436 GB of available space, the whole sh/t errors out. I'm not uninstalling/reinstalling the game every damn week.
Game has awful optimization, not recommended on this Early Access Game state. Also consumes 348 GB SSD space with all DLCs I have
ARK: Survival Ascended - Update & Crash Simulator Great game. Amazing dinosaurs. Beautiful graphics. Unfortunately, I wanted to play ARK, not beta test Unreal Engine. Updates: 15 GB What they fixed: Nobody knows What they broke: Everything FPS: Depends on the phase of the moon Lag: Always online Crashes: Free fast travel back to the desktop You spend 6 hours taming a dinosaur, building your base, and gathering...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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ARK: Survival Ascended scores 7/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/2399830/ark-survival-ascendedThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.