[GameGPU] ARK: Survival Evolved, GameWorks

[RussianSensation]

PC Gamers literally are letting PC gaming become worse, while defending it to defend their ego's that "PC Gaming > All". Meanwhile, consoles and PC graphics are closer than ever....

PC gamers aren't realizing it when they make purchases, they are voting / sending a message to the game developer if the game was even worth it making for the PC:

https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1750/1*eqcTmVH8viT8mDvp02Pxaw.png
https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1400/1*inLxOeSb3L8I1j5JUfyDQg.png
https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1400/1*mFUjUX34lFnyyicPp7kD8Q.png

In Russia, TW3 - almost surely GOTY 2015 - outsold ARK Survival by 40% on Steam. Everywhere else, ARK destroyed TW3.

Now compare sales of TW3 in Russia to those in the UK, Germany, Turkey, Brazil, Australia. In Poland, TW3 isn't even in the top 25 and it's made by a Polish developer! If PC gamers won't even support their home country's developer for one of the best games of 2015, I don't know what to say unless most of them bought it on GOG.com.

The Witcher 3 barely managed 1.087M sales on Steam to date across the world but ARK Survival broken BETA is already at 2.187M.

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*30rSfNBGQGo8co4GlsGf2w.png

Now, I know what some of you are saying, but ARK is a much cheaper game than The Witcher 3 so that must be it, right?

On PlayStation 4, that has no previous Witcher games, TW3 sold almost 3M copies and 0.93M on XB1 and that's despite the combined userbase on those 2 consoles at about 50M, a fraction of Steam's 125M as of February 2015! Surely, console peasants aren't more wealthy than PC gamers so that cannot be it either.

There are now well over 125M Steam gamers alone, which means TW3 achieved a Steam market penetration of only 0.87%. We are talking about GOTY material title with 100+ hours of gameplay. If it wasn't for PS4/XB1 console gamers buying 4M copies of TW3, CDPR could have seen big losses in 2015.

By May 2015, GTA V sold 52 million copies across all platforms but to date Steam shows just 3.6 million PC copies.

Black Ops 3 sold 764K copies on Steam vs. 8.3M on PS4, 4.42M on XB1, 1.06M on PS3, 0.95M on Xbox 360 (still more than PC!).

And this is why PC Master Race trash talking consoles is delusional non-sense since none of these huge AAA games would even exist without console gamers buying them and making bucket-loads of $ for these major studios profitable enough to consider making future games.

125M Steam users across the world would much rather play a broken Early Access game like ARK than spend $ on an open-world RGP with 100 hours and a real campaign! Even MGS V, another awesome game could not even clock 800K sales on Steam to date.

Blizzard seems to be immune but I don't blame them since they make high quality titles imo. 1M copies of Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void sold in 24Hr and this forum made almost no mention of this title but instead we have threads about "Big/important" PC games that in reality "no one on the PC cares about" like Project CARS and Anno 2205.

No wonder developers are now taking co-marketing $ from GameWorks to spend as little $ possible on PC ports and why we get broken/unoptimized AAA games as ports since clearly for most studios spending $ to make a good/optimized PC game isn't worth it since it would cost more $ to hire high quality programmers and develop a well-optimized in-house next gen game engine.

Sad stats for PC gaming 2015.
https://medium.com/steam-spy/preliminary-results-for-steam-sales-in-2015-43bb49a767bd#.pyoioxirw

ARK Survival = $1000 Pascal here I come!

 

[tential]

Wait... People actually are buying this game more than real games? Unreal... I don't get pc gamers. It's honestly why I don't identity as one.

I just like hardware.

 

[Mondozei]

Apparently every single PC gamer bought ARK and not TW3, tential? Is nuanced thinking so difficult for you? Didn't know it was a rare gift, but apparently it is these days.

There are those of us who bought MGS V, TW3, ARK and many other games and are happy with all. ARK has awesome potential and in fact is already a very fun game.

Plus, remember that early access games are often far cheaper than full games and you get to learn the game as the devs proceed, meaning that you have an advantage over other players when the game goes for a full release. It's like players who got into the Overwatch beta(granted, that game is almost finished, but the principle remains the same). It's about getting an early foot through the door and for a cheaper price.

When the game is one which is as fun and huge as ARK, it's very easy to see why it sold so well given what you get in exchange for early access and for a cheap price. People who buy into early access know exactly what it is and so to pretend the game is "broken" is just laughable, since the game hasn't been released yet.

If people want to attack ARK, then be my guest. But at least be intelligent about it.

 

[RussianSensation]

Wait... People actually are buying this game more than real games? Unreal... I don't get pc gamers. It's honestly why I don't identity as one.

I just like hardware.

On Steam, it already sold more than The Witcher 3 + MGS:V / Bioshock Infinite combined - you know real games that got 90%+ user ratings. ARK sold almost as much as FO4 on Steam.

December 15 review:

"i have almost 600 hours played, it was a great game for early access, was actually my favourite game. But now chinese players with new steam acccounts with random numbers (example: 184375922659252) just take over the server and use aimbot like crazy, hack in you tribe, demolish your stuff and disband, kill, or take your dinos. Needless to say the BIGGGG waste of my life buying this game and seeing all your work go to nothing because of some hackers."

What exactly is the issue with ARK? Is it just that everything is run on a single core? Or are there just so many individual textures being used, without any care to create texture atlases, causing draw calls to skyrocket?

Doubt it's about the textures since the game looks like *** in its current state.

Watch this short clip.

The PC game on the left is running on Core i7 6700K + 2xGTX980. The 640x480 era graphics on the right is Xbox One. The PC system cannot maintain 30 fps per the tester.

 

[MajinCry]

Doubt it's about the textures since the game looks like *** in its current state.

Watch this short clip.

The PC game on the left is running on Core i7 6700K + 2xGTX980. The 640x480 era graphics on the right is Xbox One. The PC system cannot maintain 30 fps per the tester.

Texture atlases aren't a quality thing. When an object is having draw calls dispatched, textures can be rather costly.

If a mesh has more than one texture, at least one draw call is added for each individual texture; usually more due to accompanying normal maps, shadows being cast on the texture as well as lights being cast on the texture.

Texture atlases are where the textures for a mesh (or even multiple meshes) are packed into one texture file, saving on draw calls. And the benefits can be huge in terms of draw call reductions.

'Tis one of the aspects where mods for games fall flat; for example, in Bethesda's games, modders often make outfits by mashing together pre-existing outfit meshes...Without making the textures into atlases, resulting in a butt-load of draw calls being made.

'Tis one of the biggest reasons Fallout 4's performance sucks; ever been to Diamond City? 6.5k draw calls overlooking it, on mid settings with shadow distance @ 8000 (Ultra has it at, what, 27000?); resulting in 25fps. Compared to, say, 2.5k draw calls @ 40fps.

If the textures had any effert into being atlased, the draw calls would decrease sharply.

Curious if that's the case with ARK.

 

[RussianSensation]

Texture atlases aren't a quality thing. When an object is having draw calls dispatched, textures can be rather costly.

vs.

Something is crushing those GPUs. Could be World Tile Buffers, Shadows and Epic View Distance.

On High, performance of 980Ti goes up from 26 fps to 44 fps with these settings:

VRAM usage is out of this world at 1080P.

 

[MajinCry]

-snip-

Bloody hell and broken ankles, that's terrible. The CPU scaling graph looks like it's for a game from ~2000.

And how can a game be so bollocks on these GPUs? Do they have some insanely high polycount, no culling implementations, no .DDS compression & cocked up shaders?

Well the last one's the case, what with Gameworks and all, but yeesh.

Any idea what the common texture dimensions being used are? 4096x4096?

 

[Piroko]

In Russia, TW3 - almost surely GOTY 2015 - outsold ARK Survival by 40% on Steam. Everywhere else, ARK destroyed TW3.

Now compare sales of TW3 in Russia to those in the UK, Germany, Turkey, Brazil, Australia. In Poland, TW3 isn't even in the top 25 and it's made by a Polish developer! If PC gamers won't even support their home country's developer for one of the best games of 2015, I don't know what to say unless most of them bought it on GOG.com.

The Witcher 3 barely managed 1.087M sales on Steam to date across the world but ARK Survival broken BETA is already at 2.187M.

Fairly sure those sales went to GOG. TW3 was quite a bit cheaper on GOG than it was on Steam in europe because of their 1$ != 1€ policy. It also ranked as their top selling game for months. And there are reports like this:
http://gamerant.com/the-witcher-3-gog-sales-410/

There was, however, a surprising turn of events regarding PC sales of the game. It’s been revealed that the RPG has proved to be most popular with GOG, otherwise known as Good Old Games, as opposed to Valve’s digital distribution platform Steam.

In total, a count of the PC users of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt tallies up to approximately 1.3 million gamers. Of those, 693,000 are playing the title using GOG Galaxy, the distribution site’s downloadable client. That means that over half of the PC users of The Witcher 3 are experiencing the game through GOG Galaxy, leaving the hugely popular Steam system in the dust.

 

[Mondozei]

Fairly sure those sales went to GOG. TW3 was quite a bit cheaper on GOG than it was on Steam in europe because of their 1$ != 1€ policy. It also ranked as their top selling game for months. And there are reports like this:
http://gamerant.com/the-witcher-3-gog-sales-410/

Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative!

And let's not add the fact that TW3/ARK was always the wrong comparison to begin with. What matters are early access games vs full releases as a whole and the entire market is lopsided in the latter direction. But again, we can't have manufactured outrage in such light which is the point why some people even get out of bed in the morning to begin with.

 

[Piroko]

Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative!

And let's not add the fact that TW3/ARK was always the wrong comparison to begin with. What matters are early access games vs full releases as a whole and the entire market is lopsided in the latter direction. But again, we can't have manufactured outrage in such light which is the point why some people even get out of bed in the morning to begin with.

I didn't try to factstomp him tbh, TW is pretty much the only game I know of that was available on Steam on day 1 and still sold better on a different marketplace.

Also, there's a point to be made that ARK has already saturated most of its market despite still being in alpha. Popularity peak is something that is hard to estimate with indie games.

 

[Subyman]

Spending time with some of my younger family members over Christmas lets me know who buys these games. They were hugely influenced by Minecraft and love the survival/open world concept. They don't care for a structured game like a lot of us older gamers do. They like getting on with their buddies and messing around. You can see these survival games are huge on Steam. I've tried a few and can't get into them. ARK combined building, *decent* graphics, and dinosaurs. Bam, it is a child's dream game.

The fact is, crusty old gamers that have $300+ GPUs and want a 40+ hour narrative RPG experience are becoming the has-been market.

 

[moonbogg]

I think the reason TW3 didn't sell a lot on PC is because its a dumbed down console port. The "spam and pray" fighting mechanics are a joke in all those RPG styled games. I hate them all. Push button and watch your character swing wildly at nothing until someone happens to get too close. Push button and watch your character AUTO ROLL out of the way. Break out encyclopedia of spells and try to remember what that all do etc. No wonder ARK outsold that stupid game. Only young kids on consoles like games like witcher and all these RPG styled childish, kiddy games. All these imaginary magical spell casting RPG children's dreams type games.
People should be playing real man games, like Rocket League and BF4.

 

[2is]

Rocket League is pretty awesome. Got it on PS4 when it was free via my PS+ subscription. It's awesome that both PS4 and PC players can all play on the same servers too. Good way to insure it's not going to die out anytime soon.

 

[Mercennarius]

VRAM usage is out of this world at 1080P.

At 1440P and mostly high settings I can easily use over 4GB of VRAM in this game.

 

[amenx]

I guess we're looking at Nvidias 16gb Pascal cards to handle the high res .

 

[Pantalaimon]

All these imaginary magical spell casting RPG children's dreams type games.
People should be playing real man games, like Rocket League and BF4.

Was this said in a sarcastic tone of voice? Because I can't imagine kids prefer deep story driven RPGs over games like BF4.

 

[railven]

Spending time with some of my younger family members over Christmas lets me know who buys these games. They were hugely influenced by Minecraft and love the survival/open world concept. They don't care for a structured game like a lot of us older gamers do. They like getting on with their buddies and messing around. You can see these survival games are huge on Steam. I've tried a few and can't get into them. ARK combined building, *decent* graphics, and dinosaurs. Bam, it is a child's dream game.

The fact is, crusty old gamers that have $300+ GPUs and want a 40+ hour narrative RPG experience are becoming the has-been market.

That's a good way of putting it. My nephews are asking about it now that it get an Xbone trailer. They live Minecraft.

I might have to buy a copy during this Steam sale so they can test it out.

 

[zlejedi]

In Poland, TW3 isn't even in the top 25 and it's made by a Polish developer! If PC gamers won't even support their home country's developer for one of the best games of 2015, I don't know what to say unless most of them bought it on GOG.com.

In Poland we paid 30 euro for boxed copy of TW3 on release day while steam copy costed 60.

 

[Stuka87]

I like big open world games and all, but I HATE ARK. Never have I seen a game that punishes the player so badly for not playing 24/7. It is impossible to play casually, you need to be on all the time. Or part of some massive clan so others can guard your stuff for you. And this all applies to PvE servers, its not just a PvP thing.

 

[Mercennarius]

Is there away to avoid creating a new survivor each time. Everyime I play it seems I have to create a new survivor.

 

[Aristotelian]

I like big open world games and all, but I HATE ARK. Never have I seen a game that punishes the player so badly for not playing 24/7. It is impossible to play casually, you need to be on all the time. Or part of some massive clan so others can guard your stuff for you. And this all applies to PvE servers, its not just a PvP thing.

Exactly. And I'm speaking from the perspective from someone that joined a server fresh with some friends, fought like crazy to get one of the caves, and every step of the way was attrition. But at some point, our victory was down to having some players spending a good 60 hours a week in our clan online, and knowing when to attack our opponents. We obliterated all competition on the server to such an extent that we had so many bases, backup bases, and the only thing we were doing is seeking perfect tames, doing the bronto base thing. People on our server were so upset they posted somewhere on reddit begging super active clans to start on our server - by that time almost all of us had quit; but we just came back - they destroyed a few of our bases and we wiped them out in one raid.

I'm done with the game permanently - and that's the thing - I'm not surprised that the Witcher 3 didn't sell more - it's lacking an online/cooperative component which is exactly why Ark sells - gamers asking clan members from other games (e.g., CS) to come play Ark with them.

I'm not surprised, but I am dismayed. I did a few mistakes in my Witcher 3 playthrough and will be replaying it with my new PC next year.