Snail Games: Corruption Within
By Sean Docherty
Snail Games is a video game publisher known to many for all the wrong reasons. Shortly after being founded in 2014 the company has been surrounded in a shadow of controversy. Most of the controversy surrounding the company came after 2015 when Snail Game purchased Studio Wildcard known for their hit survival game Ark: Survival Evolved.
Ark: Survival Evolved was officially released in 2017 and has since been Studio Wildcard’s pride and joy. Ark is a survival game in the same genre as Rust, Subnautica and Sea of Thieves. What attracted so many people was the fact it was the first survival game to include dinosaurs that you could battle and tame. It seemed like the sky was the limit for this new ambitious game.
However, Snail Games took some poorly thought-out actions. Time and time again they kept trying to implement pay to win mechanics which were ultimately denied by Wildcard. These actions angered and disappointed the community.
More outrage in the Ark community was expressed when players would mysteriously get banned with the developers not explaining why. However, all the bans had one thing in common, they all happened either after or while attempting to raid a tribe by the name of ‘Tea’. This tribe was known by many to be owned by Snail Games CEO, Shi Hai.
More and more whispers of corruption began to ring around the Ark community with evidence of the owner of the tribe giving him and his tribemates an unfair advantage over everyone else playing. This would go on for a further two years before one of the largest Ark content creators called HOD uploaded a video calling out and showing evidence gathered over the past few years to expose corruption within the company. It seemed that this video was the spark that lit the fire of anger within the community towards Snail Games.
In my opinion, Snail Games have constantly made their greed for money obvious after releasing two overpriced games that were seriously underdeveloped. After announcing and failing to release Ark 2 on schedule, Ark: Survival Ascended was announced as a means of compensation for the delay of Ark 2. With the announcement came a promise of paying £49.99 for a bundle containing both games which was also backtracked on.
Snail Games rescinded their initial promise, informing players they would now have to pay for both games separately.
After this most of if not all trust between company and community was lost, with Snail Games not taking accountability for their actions, forcing Wildcard to make changes that suited them and letting Wildcard take the criticism which could be viewed as cowardly.
The loyalty of the Ark fanbase is the only reason the game has not been fully boycotted and instead of honouring the community, Snail Games have constantly decided to take advantage of it.