ARK: Survival Evolved
Fair · RPG · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $14.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 67h
- Value
- $0.22/hr
- Reviews
- 83% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GTX 670 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or better, 60 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Stranded on the shores of a mysterious island, you must learn to survive. Use your cunning to kill or tame the primeval creatures roaming the land, and encounter other players to survive, dominate... and escape!
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
It has never been cheaper than $9.59. That was May 2017. 50 discounts in the 11 years on record. They run about 60 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. 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 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 5 percent on value. It is pricier than 77 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 83 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Valheim ($29.99, scores 92) beats it on value, while it beats ARK: Survival Ascended ($44.99, scores 7).
The press gave it 70; the people who bought it give it 83 percent. A 13-point gap in the buyer's favour.
12 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 47 percent of the 26,318 reviews written there were positive, against 83 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 67 hours; clearing it takes 920, which is 14 times the campaign.
9 years after release it still had 22.2K people in it at once.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
57% start to 4% 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
22.2K 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
Where do I start? ARK has been a huge part of my life and is the whole reason I got into PC gaming in the first place, the game itself is super fun and you will not find any other survival game quite like this one, It hits all the nerdy niches, Dinosaurs, Prehistoric Life, Guns, Castles, Ancient Egypt, Kaiju's, Aliens, Dragons, Fantasy creatures. All that being said, the dev team, or publisher, or both, are so...
Well yes, this game was very poorly optimize but the content, gameplay, open-world, DLCs really cary this game A LOT, it is a sh*t game, but it was also peak, its really impossible to find something elase to replace this game, Palworld, Valheim, Terraria even Minecraft, cannot give the vibe, the feeling of what ARK could give you, so better think twice or even third before buying it, because it will be a pain to...
ive owned this game since VERY early on, maybe within months of its original launch, and at this point, they've shoved so much useless ♥♥♥♥ into it and made it so large that it doesnt fit onto any of my SSDs, making it literally unplayable. it was fun in the early days, but over time has had so much unwanted junk added to it that it's just not enjoyable. I wish I could refund it for being physically impossible to...
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.
Cite this score
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ARK: Survival Evolved scores 67/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/346110/ark-survival-evolvedThe 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 10, price as of Sep 22.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.