The company did not appear to exist before this game.
I can not find any: corperation address, phone number, employee records, etc at all online.
The company website only has a single item(that is a link to ARK: Survival Evolved's site:
playark.com)playark.com, registratrar is
GODADDY.COM, and when looking closer at a whois sheet:
https://who.godaddy.com/whoisstd.aspx?domain=playark.com&prog_id=GoDaddy&k=EtGMyRqJSGtFaHd%20bR8ITCeWp01I3an54j0ksxK18gqvKIsEHKBsE9AF2d2AoJwEYou see the registrant as a proxy domain company.
"Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Registrant Street:
DomainsByProxy.comRegistrant Street: 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309"
The trail ends there are no records can be obtained past
DomainsByProxy.com (They're very serious about client privacy apparently).
Just about every game these days is registered under the publisher name, (If you go to the whois for battlefield, you'll see Electronic Arts. Not a proxy.)
The only contact to their company is a mailto redirect on the game's website, linking as:
mailto:jobs@studiowildcard.comAm I only person who finds it bothering that the game is being both produced and published at a fairly high price(as it's being developed for linux, mac, PC, & both Xbox one & PS4), but a ghost company?
*TO CLARIFY EDIT:* I don't mean high price as in price of purchase, but high price in developement of the game.
There is no wiki page, I can't find it publically traded anywhere. I can't find -anything- on it besides a few "company profile" pages that are missing everything(phone, address, etc) but the company's name.
And to those who may point out I don't own the game, you're right. and this is the #1 reason why.
A company that's doing everything possible to keep itself hidden... isn't exactly a good thing, as there is no valid, good reason for them to not want to build up a brand name.
If you're keen on looking up information about Studio Wildcard to determine if they're legitimate or not, take a gander at the various positions previously held by their co-Founder and co-Creative Director, Jesse Rapczak.
This isn't a mod-team attempting to launch their first game.
Also pretty sure they only formed the company in November of last year.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/studio-wildcard?trk=ppro_cprof
Hey Monarchco, nice to meet you!
I know it is hard to believe that a small, unknown team of developers has produced ARK - but that's the games industry for you. All of us on this project have worked on a bunch of titles big and small, as well as cutting edge hardware platforms in our various jobs and roles prior to this.
We have no publisher at this time and no external money source "guiding" our development, which is great for everyone in the community and the purity of the game. We are very transparent about everything we do and hope through following our development of the game you will be even more excited about what the team might do in the future.
Jesse Rapczak
A Real Person Who Lives In Seattle
It was a little confusing as well until I read this as sometimes you released patches EST, sometimes PST. Posts from devs also seem to regularly swap between American and British spellings of words. Nice to hear about the transparency though!
In any case, yes, I'm sure they invested and spent a lot on developing ark. I also think they already made a pretty penny given that this is probably the most successful EA I've ever seen.
Keep up the good work, you guys deserve it, this game is hella fun. Keep squashing those bugs.
We have team members spread around the world. As you can see from our job posting we don't shy away from talented people working remotely instead of on site:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72564-ARK-Survival-Evolved
My apologies. I just figured from the lack of an extensive company website, along with many of the posts being very related to Jurassic World(plus the timing of the game going early access fairly close), that Wildcard was a company owned by Universal Studios(Who have been terrible with almost every game their name has been on, and would explain them using a different name).
Much like how Disney makes action movies, but primarily puts the producer as only Marvel for all the marvel movies(no branding by Disney anywhere to be seen unless you go digging and find Marvel is owned by Disney).
With my concern was if it was a game solely for additional movie content. And well, I think most of us know how well most movie games work out.
Anyways, just glad your not owned by some company with a terrible enough track record that it'd benefit them to make a game through a brand new asset(like Universal.)