Studio Wildcard

Studio Wildcard is the American video game developer behind the ARK franchise and the developer and publisher of ARK 2. The studio is best known for ARK: Survival Evolved (2017) and the Unreal Engine 5 remaster ARK: Survival Ascended (2023), and it is now leading work on the sequel covered across this wiki. For a high-level summary of the new game, see the Overview page.

Studio Profile

Notable Games

Studio History

The company was founded in October 2014 under the name Wildcard Properties LLC, with leadership shared between Doug Kennedy as CEO, Jeremy Stieglitz as co-founder and lead designer/programmer, Jesse Rapczak as creative director, and Susan Browning Stieglitz. Stieglitz had recently exited a previous studio under a one-year non-compete clause, which influenced the timing of the launch and the early hiring pattern. The team operated out of two offices, one in Redmond, Washington and one in Gainesville, Florida, and the dual-coast footprint has carried forward into the current era.

The debut title, ARK: Survival Evolved, entered Steam Early Access in June 2015 and reached full release in August 2017. It became the studio's flagship product and over its lifetime has sold more than 76 million copies cumulatively across all platforms, by parent-company figures. The franchise expanded with a long sequence of paid expansions, console ports, and cross-platform live-service updates.

On October 25, 2023, the studio launched ARK: Survival Ascended, an Unreal Engine 5 remaster of the original game. It entered the market through Early Access on PC and console and surpassed four million units sold by December 2025. Survival Ascended is the studio's primary live-service runtime today and continues to receive expansion content while the team builds out the sequel.

Ownership

In December 2015, Wildcard Properties LLC was acquired by SDE Inc., a Snail Games USA affiliate, through a merger with a subsidiary called Snail Ark Inc. The transaction made the studio a wholly owned subsidiary of the larger group, and the corporate parent has been Snail Games ever since. Snail Games is publicly listed on the Nasdaq exchange and reports ARK franchise figures as part of its consolidated results, which is the reason cumulative sales numbers and live-service unit counts for both Survival Evolved and Survival Ascended are publicly disclosed. The 2025 Investor Day in particular is what re-confirmed the 2028 target window for ARK 2 to investors.

Vin Diesel's Role

Vin Diesel's involvement with the studio runs deeper than a marquee voice role. Since 2020, he has held the title of President of Creative Convergence at Studio Wildcard, a senior creative-leadership position covering franchise direction across games, animation, and licensing. He is credited as executive producer on ARK 2 and on the connected animated series, and he voices and performs as Santiago da Costa, the player character of ARK 2. The studio's leadership has stated that Diesel is a long-time ARK player rather than a celebrity attachment, and design decisions on the Santiago character were reshaped after he came on board.

ARK 2 Co-Development

ARK 2 is not built solely in-house. The credited co-development partner is Grove Street Games, a studio brought in to share the engineering and production workload alongside the existing live-service obligations on Survival Ascended. Their director, Thomas Williamson, serves as the Development and Technical Director on ARK 2. The partnership is the structural reason the team can keep shipping content for the Unreal Engine 5 remaster while a sequel of this scope is in active production. It also explains why ARK 2's tooling and engine work has tracked the studio's adoption of Unreal Engine 5 across both products in parallel.

Risk-Conscious Roadmap

The studio's leadership has been openly cautious about the risk of launching a sequel of this size as a single self-contained release. To reduce that risk, the team has moved several of ARK 2's signature mechanics into a paid expansion for the existing UE5 remaster called Legacy of Santiago, scheduled for Q4 2027. That expansion is not ARK 2 itself, but it acts as a public test bed: soulslike combat, advanced traversal, smaller-tribe pacing, and the primitive-only weapon ramp will all be shipped to a live audience inside the older runtime so the team can iterate on tuning, networking, and player feedback before the sequel arrives.

Jeremy Stieglitz has framed the strategy bluntly. As he put it in public communication, every game can have an expansion pack that is a miss and the team can simply move on, but if a whole new game misses, it can be company-ending. Pulling the new mechanics into a tested expansion ahead of time is the studio's response to that exposure, and it is part of why the 2028 ARK 2 window is being held rather than pulled forward.

Unconfirmed Details

Several aspects of the studio's current operation have not been published. The total Studio Wildcard headcount across the Redmond and Gainesville offices is not publicly disclosed. The exact number of Grove Street Games staff assigned to ARK 2, and the split of responsibilities between the two studios, has not been broken out. The studio has not announced any internal team structure beyond the named leadership roles, and no future projects beyond ARK 2 and the existing Survival Ascended live-service plan have been confirmed. This page will be updated as the studio publishes additional staffing, partner, or roadmap details.