Studio Wildcard, the developer that in January announced a free upgrade of its six-year-old Ark: Survival Evolved with Unreal Engine 5, said Friday that players will actually have to pay for it if they want it (opens in new tab) The company said.

"The UE5 teaser a few weeks ago was a completely free upgrade/remastered version of Ark Survival Evolved on Unreal Engine 5," Studio Wildcard co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz tweeted in January (Open in new tab). It's not cinematic; we haven't officially announced the Ark UE5 upgrade yet."

The official announcement of Ark: Survival Ascended, also known as the UE5 remaster, was made last week (opens in new tab), but without the "free" part specifically. Instead, Studio Wildcard stated that "players can only get it through the ultimate bundle called the $50 ARK Respawned Bundle, which includes Ark: Survival Ascended and the recently delayed Ark 2." The bundle will be available for purchase "for up to one year" starting at the end of August. After that, Ark 2 and Survival Ascended will be available for individual purchase.

The announcement has not been received uniformly favorably by fans. Some players are frustrated at the prospect of having to repurchase the game at full price to obtain the UE5 upgrade, leaving Xbox One and PlayStation 4 console players completely out in the cold. It has also sparked discussion that Studio Wildcard may be struggling with the development costs of Ark 2. Some posters on this Reddit thread (open in new tab) have defended the move, saying that the costs are really for Ark 2 pre-orders, but that defense doesn't really fly: Ark 2 is not expected to launch until a very vague "end of 2024" and and there is no other way to get Ark: Survival Ascended in the meantime.

To make matters worse, the official servers for Ark: Survival Evolved will go offline upon the release of Survival Ascended.

"At that point, the final save data for the official Ark: Survival Evolved servers will be uploaded and players will be able to re-host on their own servers or play single player/non-dedicated." Single-player, non-dedicated, player-only, and unofficial server play will remain available; Ark: Survival Ascended will have its own official network, fully supported on all platforms.

And of course, while the UE5 upgrade is promised to be free, and Stieglitz's tweet to that effect is still up, the simple fact is that it actually costs as much as the full game. For example, Redditor 4ar0n stated that getting Ark remastered and Ark 2 for $50 is "a special deal," but "Jeremy should never have said that Ark would be upgraded for free.

"Forcing people to buy Ark 2, selling the DLC separately with the remaster (usually included), and removing the original official server.

Several messages to this effect were posted on Twitter in response to the announcement:

Studio Wildcard said that Ark: Survival Evolved and Survival Ascended will not support cross-play because the remastered versions because they have undergone "significant feature changes" that prevent compatibility, he said.

In a statement sent to PC Gamer, Studio Wildcard executive producer Jatheish Karunakaran acknowledged that Steglitz had been premature in his January tweet.

"We are really excited about delivering a great Ark UE5 experience," Karunakaran said. "We admit that we got ahead of ourselves back in January because we were not yet aware of the time, development resources, and costs required to produce a complete next-generation remaster as the scope of the project expanded," said Studio Wildcard.

Studio Wildcard also confirmed that players who want the Unreal Engine 5 version of Ark, or Ark: Survival Ascended, will need to purchase it in a $50 bundle with Ark 2.