When Studio Wildcard released ARK: Survival Ascended, its Unreal Engine 5 remaster of the highly successful open world survival game ARK: Survival Evolved, the studio bet heavily on the power of modding and user-generated content.
Studio Wildcard partnered with Overwolf’s CurseForge to deliver these mods not just on Steam but everywhere, from PC to consoles. In addition to the dedicated webpage, there’s an in-game browser where users can check out the over 1900 mods available in ARK: Survival Ascended, which range from new weapons to new armor, creatures, and even fully-fledged game modes and high-quality maps.
Studio Wildcard and Overwolf did not stop there, though. They allowed the development of Premium Mods, and now nine of these paid mods are also available on Xbox Series S|X, with PlayStation 5 following soon. I’ve spoken with Studio Wildcard’s Lead Designer and Co-Creative Director Jeremy Stieglitz and Overwolf’s Chief Marketing Officer Shahar Sorek to discuss the importance of this landmark release and the role that user-generated content will play in the future of the games industry.
First, let’s talk about this partnership between Overwolf and Studio Wildcard for ARK: Survival Ascended mods. How did it come about?
Jeremy Stieglitz: When we looked at doing a new version of ARK, we knew by looking at the original game that modding was very important for that game’s success. But we asked ourselves the question, how can we make modding more of a core pillar of the game that will benefit all players for all versions of the game, not just the PC version, not just the Steam version?
In ARK: Survival Evolved, it wasn’t even just that mods were limited to PC. They were limited to Steam. We had versions of the game on Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, and those versions wouldn’t even work with the Steam mods.
We were looking at the limitations of Steam Workshop and really getting the sense that Valve had no plans to evolve it beyond that. Also, it was not just about making mods more available to a wider audience, but how we could make an ecosystem by which people could discover them more naturally, like in the game and really kind of relate it more to game logic and game categories and game flow, UI and so forth. But also, is there a way to make a financial ecosystem, not really for our benefit, but for the creators themselves so they can actually have an incentive to create higher quality mods, more ambitious mods, which benefits us in a fundamental way of increasing player engagement? Making more things for people to play in the game, higher quality things, especially because we know a key challenge with these live service games is the content treadmill as developers struggle to keep up with the amount of playable content that gamers reasonably expect on a weekly basis for these online service games, and that is very challenging for a small developer to do.
Mods are a great benefit. They don’t eliminate the need for official content, but they definitely help make the game feel fresh on a daily basis. When content is created by end users, it’s exciting.
So, all of that was so important to us, but here’s the thing. We had no experience in any of that, so we knew that it was not in our capability to build anything like that. We looked around and it turned out that Overwolf and CurseForge had already been working on systems very much in line with those goals. At this point, I’ll turn it over to them, and they can describe kind of what they have been building and how that relates to ARK: Survival Ascended.
Shahar Sorek: Thank you, Jeremy. I’ll start from the top with Overwolf and Curseforge. We see a massive shift happening in the world of gaming, with the demand for in-game content and user-generated content on a massive rise. That’s due to players wanting to play more experiences, but also to all sorts of other demands, the rise of user acquisition, which makes it very tough for developers to attract players, and the extreme costs of developing extra content. So we see a world in which by the end of this decade, the time players spend on user generated content and mods is way bigger than the time spent on actually playing the core experience of the game. We are on a mission to create an ecosystem and a marketplace to support that because at the core of what we’re trying to do is say that modders are really developers and they should get paid for that, hence premium mods right now.
It’s like when YouTube came along, people put up videos, and suddenly, there was this new world called streamers. With Overwolf, we call modders and app and private server developers in-game creators, and the number one stat in our company that we measure is how much money in a year we managed to facilitate and help these creators earn.
In 2023, it was $201 million. Our goal by the end of the decade is to hit 1 billion. Studio Wildcard is probably the number one studio that we found so committed to the creator economy. They share the same view with us. We think that each game or worthwhile deep AAA experience is a content hub.
We’re on a mission to detoxify each of those games and to allow for tools, from the tech tools to the moderating tools, to discoverability tools, to help those games enlist what I call the creator Legion to help build within them and also for some mods to monetize them.
We need to remember that the core of the modding experience is free and will always stay free. Within that, we’ve decided to work with Studio Wildcard on opening a new creator category: the premium mod creator, DLC-level mod creator. This category can then be opened up to small game studios and really talented teams that could build DLC-level content.
It’s a big win for the studio because they’re getting a velocity of content on a whole other level; it’s a big win for the creators because we can make money. It’s a big win for the players who can discover in-game all sorts of new content. What’s happening right now is that there are a few firsts in terms of tech. Getting modders to deploy on consoles, for instance, was nearly impossible because the consoles needed to approve the mod.
Together with Studio Wildcard, we built auto-cooking, which means ARK: Survival Ascended modders can submit the mods to us, and our tech takes care of the cooking. Now, deployment on all platforms is much easier because they have a mod that can be distributed or cooked at the same time for all these platforms, which wasn’t possible before.
There’s also cross-play, so if I download an ARK: Survival Ascended mod on PC and Jeremy plays it on Xbox, we can play the same mod at the same instance. These things are a first in the world of modding. We’re going to see many more, I think, games adopt this and try to go for it. But this is all innovation within the UGC world.
Jeremy Stieglitz: A small asterisk there. I do think the Unreal Fortnite Editor has a similar capability for cross-platform through Epic’s systems. But I think what we and Overwolf have built together is more flexible in many ways.
Fortnite does allow people to use these PC based tools to create content that then goes on to the three main platforms (PC, Xbox, and PlayStation), but what you can do with the mods is currently much more limited. Epic hobbles various capabilities of the engine deliberately for quality control reasons. For example, they disallow access to the lower-level blueprint logic of the engine, favoring only a higher-level text scripting language called the Verse, which is kind of like JavaScript. There are lots of limitations with Verse, both functionally and performance-wise, like writing a game in JavaScript, which is not exactly what you want to be doing if you want to write a deep, high-performance experience.
The second thing is currently they don’t allow mods to be directly sold. They only have an engagement-based compensation system, which I think is maybe appropriate for super creators, but not very appropriate for non-super creators. And then thirdly, just from a technical standpoint, they don’t allow mods to interoperate. Every mod experience in Fortnite is its own self-contained thing, whereas the way it’s designed in ARK: Survival Ascended is that the end user can mix and match mods in many cases to create their own customized game experience.
Some mods are standalone, but many of them are designed to interoperate. That allows more of a user-centric experience of exactly how you want to kind of customize your gameplay and what you want to add or remove from it. These are maybe fine-grained distinctions, but I do think fundamentally, Overwolf’s and Studio Wildcard’s approach is more traditionally mod-centric.
It’s like what modding has been to PCs for many years, translating that to other platforms and also making an automatic compensation mechanism for the creators themselves. I think Epic has made many strides, and it’s probably the most similar with Fortnite, but it is different and, in many ways, not as featureful.
Roblox, of course, is another example. Uh, mentioned earlier. What fundamentally distinguishes what we have done with ARK: Survival Ascended from Roblox is that Roblox is just a set of tools in the game to allow you to build environments and simple scripting within the game.
Ultimately, that is cool for learning basic game development principles and for younger creators who are maybe just starting out and understanding what it means to create game content. But it’s not really like game development end-to-end. The tools to make our content are located in a full-fledged, no-limits Unreal editor. That’s full end-to-end game development. It’s exactly the same tools and code that we use to make our own content, our own full-size expansion packs.
Modders can even literally create games that are entirely different from ours. We uploaded a steamboat Willy platformer as an example of something that has no gameplay relation to ARK: Survival Ascended. If they want, they can kind of wipe away all of our functionality and build something new, taking it all the way down to the foundational classes and building a new experience up from those foundational Unreal classes. With respect to Roblox, it’s much less like actual game development and more like map-making within their existing game. People creating content for Roblox come up against the hard wall of like, I want to do this thing, but I can’t because the tools aren’t letting me.
That’s just not really the case with what’s provided here. We’re excited to see and I think we’ve seen already that people have made more and more ambitious content over these weeks since the launch of premium mods earlier this year. It’s getting a little bit more advanced, a little bit more ambitious, and that’s going to continue to occur, I think, over the coming weeks and months.
The flip side is that you will need to be proficient in Unreal Engine development to make mods for ARK: Survival Ascended, which is not something every modder is familiar with.
Jeremy Stieglitz: Yes, admittedly, it’s not great if you’ve never dabbled in game development before. You’d have to learn a lot. Your first step is learning Unreal, then. It is a more advanced thing. I mean, a lot of hobbyists are capable of that or interested in that. One nice principle, though, is if you do learn how to make Unreal content with the ARK development kit, you now know how to make Unreal content, which is a skill transferable to innumerable games or even a full-fledged industry job. However, I think content creation for games can be a job as this economy continues to grow. But if you did want to go work at a traditional development studio, if you know how to make Unreal Engine content, that is a fundamentally marketable and transferable skill.
If you know how to make Roblox content, congratulations, but that’s only useful inside Roblox. I think this is a very important distinction for people who actually want to learn more about making game content with Unreal, as they can do that inside of ARK.
I guess Microsoft and Sony still want their usual 30% cut, as they do with all regular DLCs, right?
Shahar Sorek: This is still all in the works. It’s a new model, and this is the first time premium mods are sold inside. And yes, everybody gets their cut here. I still can’t go into the numbers. It’s all happening as we speak. I could just say that numbers-wise, it’s done much better than we thought initially it should do. If it continues like this, we’re talking about a new section in the industry as a whole because we’ll see many studios adapt.
I can say that on ARK: Survival Ascended alone, we had close to 160 million mod downloads since we opened it up, of which I think around 65 percent have been on Xbox. In terms of how this splits, well, the platform gets something, the creator gets something, and then Studio Wildcard and Overwolf get something. You could think of it as a broad split right now until we’re ready to reveal more of the numbers. But I want to tie it in a little bit to what you guys spoke about before, which is that this is opening up a new creator category. So now you can see serious small studios that, instead of pursuing a triple-A game that might take three to four years to make, can now create a DLC-level experience for a premium price in a much shorter time, meaning there’s new revenue and new ways for them to exist. We’re going to see many more small studios say, I’m going to upload a mod to ARK, and then maybe six months to a year later, I’ll upload a mod to Fortnite or another of the games we’re opening up later this year. It becomes a whole new way to survive and kind of redefine what a creator is in the world of games, which is shrinking as it did in this last year, so we’re going to see new sources of revenue and opportunities for developers to find a way to make a living.
Jeremy Stieglitz: On the subject of consoles specifically, I think it’s important to remember that this is so new on consoles. I think Roblox took a step in that direction. Fortnite took a much bigger step, given how their tools work and the power of Unreal. But then this is kind of a third step of direct selling these kinds of premium Unreal contents onto consoles.
Previously those platforms, Xbox and PlayStation, were so locked down. User generated content was almost unheard of on those devices up until a couple of years ago in a serious way. I would say this is one of the last taboos to really fall with respect to the kind of experience or content people can get or play on traditional video game consoles.
What I think is really interesting about it is for hobbyists. People who may not have any console development experience or have not fully committed themselves yet to a career in the game industry. This is a great way to get experienced in console game development because effectively, what you’re able to do is use a regular retail console unit like an Xbox or PlayStation that you buy off the store shelves and Develop your Unreal content on pc as normal using the toolset that we’ve provided. Then you’re able to put that content onto your console and test it out, play it with your friends, and then even release it and sell it on the console without ever having to get development hardware, which costs many thousands of dollars, or become a specialized capitalized business registered with Microsoft and Sony. Going through all those steps requires six figures of capitalization, essentially.
Shahar Sorek: I wanted to add to what Jeremy was saying now and talk about compliance. There’s a reason these platforms haven’t opened up until now. This is another pillar; it’s not a sexy pillar, but it’s something we take care of. There’s a lot of issues in compliance that would shut down UGC and have shut down UGC in the past. Moderation and curation for safety, what goes up, what can be exposed, because once you upload this mod, it gets distributed to all the players immediately.
Some things have to do with how that piece of content is handled from a compliance standpoint, which is moderation, legal, and safety. But also, with modding there’s another layer of creation protection. There are situations where a modder will upload a mod, and that mod can be used to create other mods. So all these issues have been solved for the platforms by us. This is a whole other layer of procedural compliance innovation that had to come hand in hand with the stuff Jeremy spoke about regarding the technology and what it allows creators to do.
That’s definitely something I wanted to talk about. Curation is always an issue with user-generated content and certainly even more so on consoles. How do you handle that for ARK: Survival Ascended?
Shahar Sorek: Overwolf was built on deploying UGC about a decade ago. We have vast experience and a unique three-tier system of moderation and curation. First, we have an in-house team that manually checks every piece of content, and then we have AI and automation tools to check it. Then, we’re in touch with the community, which also does this last test on it.
We’ve been able to tell and come to studios and take full legal responsibility for content being vetted and curated, which for Studio Wildcard and all the serious studios that have a massive UGC community and model community is a game changer because the studio needs to focus on making the best possible game experience for the gamers, and we take the responsibility of taking full ownership of allowing the creator economy and a creator community to engage with the game.
That’s moderation, curation, safety, and market activities. That’s monetization. All of that, zero to hero so that the studio can focus on the game. We enabled the legion of creators and everybody works with everybody. We standardize creation and monetization for everybody. Again, I want to stress that with everything we’re doing, free mods are the core experience of the gamers.
There will always be free mods. We also vet the fidelity of content. You can’t just upload something and put a price tag on it. It needs to be vetted and uphold certain standards before it goes live with a price tag.
Jeremy Stieglitz: There’s one thing that I would say is unique in this respect: as a creator, you are able to essentially get the tools, create your content, upload it, and test it out yourself and among a few white-listed testers without any roadblocks put in your place, without any speed bumps or gates, and that’s very useful because it does allow creators to have an iterative pipeline where they’re able to immediately start testing and playing their content on all the devices and refining it before they present to the public for, uh, before they present it for release review. Otherwise, if there was a gate at every step, it would be too slow. This actually internally allows a creator to just go make stuff, and then when it’s ready, they’re even able to test it on the console devices themselves. Being able to do that is such an essential bullet point feature that is highly reliant on the backend technology that Overwolf put together to make it possible to test out. You can essentially deliver the content to your own console via the system that Overwolf has created. It’s really cool.
I’ve read in your press release that ARK: Survival Ascended currently supports $2 to $10 premium mods. Is there a hard limit, or could someone make a $30 mod?
Shahar Sorek: We’re all testing this in real time and live. There are mods for $2, $5, there’s $10, and there’s maybe $15. I think we need to see how the market behaves and how it makes sense. There aren’t any hard lines on what to price what. I would say that when we come to pricing these mods, we work closely with the studio on what makes sense. This is not something the modder can just put up and say, oh, I want this and that. This whole system needs to reek of transparency and trust and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do. So, to your question, maybe there will be a mod that will justify that level of price, but it will be something that we’ll all shake hands on it before we put it up.
Jeremy Stieglitz: One last thing I want to mention is obviously one important thing to traditional modding on PC is that it’s as open as possible. Notably, you can actually flag a mod when you create one in ARK: Survival Ascended as a PC-only mod, and if you flag the mod as PC-only non-premium, it just automatically goes up.
It can have after the fact review if it’s offensive or breaks copyright infringing rules and so forth. But if you create a PC-only non-premium mod, then it behaves just like any open traditional modding platform, where you create something and it’s immediately available to the extent you, as the creator, decide to publish it.
That is important so that people don’t feel like modding in the traditional sense is now slowed down to a crawl. The speed bumps and gates are in place for the console releases, so if you flag it as cross-platform and you want to release it cross-platform, that’s when it has to go through the internal review process at Overwolf. Thankfully, they’re very fast and effective on that, but it is a necessary legal step for the platform to allow the release on consoles.
I’ve also read that Premium Mods still aren’t available on the PS5 of ARK: Survival Ascended. Any ETA you can share on that?
Jeremy Stieglitz: Yeah, hopefully in the next week or so. They are actively working on buttoning up the last few things with that platform.
Premium mods aren’t exactly a novel concept. Bethesda, arguably one of the biggest developers when it comes to modding, has already tried that a few times and encountered a fair amount of resistance from the community. How do you feel about that? Do you reckon most modders will continue to be against this opportunity?
Jeremy Stieglitz: I’ll give my own developer thoughts on that, and then Shahar can provide his insight on it as well. I feel that that controversy, in particular, which has bubbled up every now and then, as you said, is usually around Bethesda. It’s like every five years or so, there’s a little thing involving it, but the last time I remember they attempted it was almost like five or six years ago, if not longer, on Steam Workshop, and I do think that player habits, consumer habits, and the whole industry have changed a lot in that time.
They actually reintroduced that in Skyrim a few months ago under Creations, which includes both free and paid mods.
Jeremy Stieglitz: Okay. Good to know. I had read they had actually reintroduced the kit. I wasn’t sure if they had made the decision to enable premium capability on it. I think, ultimately, this speaks to the broader point that the taboo has shifted over that five or six-year time frame. People accept the fact more generally now that these mods and creators are getting so good, so in-depth, they are basically taking all of people’s time to make them, and they can become a full-time job in terms of dedication to create something really great. It’s ultimately a personal decision for the creator as to whether they want to put all that time in and then release it to the world for nothing except, you know, acclaim, which is great.
People love that. That’s one of the reasons we make stuff: so that people can play it, say they liked it, give us feedback, and so forth. But if they really want to be able to support themselves and make it a full-time job where they don’t have to do anything else for the rest of their days, that’s just not possible unless they have some method of compensation. Epic has decided on an engagement-based compensation for now. there’s also the idea of direct sales based compensation. I believe that players themselves, as they’ve experienced higher and higher quality content, know how much value it adds to their experiences, especially as the whole industry has shifted towards live service titles.
I believe very strongly that there’s more acceptance on the part of the creator of players that this is a valid part of the video game ecosystem as long, and I think this is the critical point that Shahar was making earlier, as long as it doesn’t displace that there’s also free content. It’s a personal decision really on the part of the creator whether the content should be free or premium. There’ll be great free content. There’ll be great premium content. If it was all premium, then yeah, what’s the point in that scenario? You gotta have a good, healthy mix of both. I do think the premium mod taboo has essentially fallen. I also think it’s fallen, especially for online service games.
I think if you have an offline single-player-only game that’s oriented around a fixed set of content and doesn’t evolve much over time, premium mods are a bit of a harder sell because, at that point, you kind of say, well, this is the game that I played start to finish and that’s that. Why should I be compelled to play any further, especially at a price point? It’s a little different when the game is constantly evolving in an online space and there’s a constant need for more content and new experiences. That’s my view on it, and the trends all have been pointing in that direction for a while, but now they’re all fully oriented in that way.
Shahar Sorek: There are a few core differences, I think. Also, in terms of the experience itself, discovering mods in ARK: Survival Ascended within the context of the game lobby is a very different experience than going to a website and downloading a mod.
That allows us to create a lot more transparency in what is a premium mod and what is a free mod. It allows the ARK user to distinguish way more healthily the value of a premium mod. And that, on top of everything Jeremy said about the shifts in the industry, creates a valid opportunity for all parties involved.
Also, we need to remember that many of these creators are influencers. They have a whole community of players ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand that follow and want to create them in this space. This allows them a very specific in-game native in-world environment to deal with those who follow and love what they’re doing. So, it’s an ecosystem. It’s not just that you’re getting paid. You’re getting another tool for your relationship with those who consume your content.
What was the reaction of ARK: Survival Ascended modders to the premium mod news?
Jeremy Stieglitz: Generally, it was quite positive. There was some initial reaction where they were like, that’s a bridge we’re not sure if we want to cross. I think that overall, especially as they’ve seen it work and other modders have now released their content using the premium channel, they appreciate if they do want to make money with the hard work they’re putting into the process of making this stuff, that that option is there.
That’s the best way to view it: it’s an option. It’s not like you have to do this. If you really feel that this is how you want to try to make money and spend your time, make a possibly even a career out of this, that that’s now an avenue you can take, or if you just want to kind of keep it as a casual hobby. Though I would argue, of course, that many free creators spend all their time on it anyway if they can support themselves and how, you know, it’s possible. But the option to actually make a living off of doing it is something that creators, on the whole now, have appreciated. I think it’s a very positive outcome.
I know that players appreciate it as well. I’ll tell you on a personal note that before I became a professional game developer, I was a modder way back. I started with Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2. Those were my three big ones.
It was around that time after Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, which had a very advanced scripting language, that I decided maybe I could learn a little bit deeper how to make a game from scratch and try and make something commercial with the skills I had built up. But I will tell you, if I had been able to make any money to support myself creating mods, I would have been thrilled.
It was always interesting to spend countless hours. Thankfully, I was in high school at the time, so I didn’t have to support myself with a job, but I did have a job doing web programming in addition to making mods. It would have been nice not to have to have an additional job on top of creating and just being able to spend all my time doing that and using that as an onboarding mechanism to more advanced game development.
I think it created a challenge of how you transition from creating mods to actually supporting yourself, kind of getting a professional job in the game industry. Frankly, eliminating that distinction is to the benefit of creators. Eliminating the distinction between professional job holders versus mod creators and saying, look, if people are willing to pay for your content, then there is no distinction.
That creates a much smoother, less binary on-ramp. You’re either creating stuff for free, and that’s all you can ever do, and you can make no money, or you have a desk job somewhere in a traditional studio. Creating such a spectrum of options between those two extremes is a wonderful thing.
Some ARK: Survival Ascended fans may be wary of this initiative and fear it could take much time off your schedule to make official content. How would you respond to that concern?
Jeremy Stieglitz: The good news is that we have a very large team that cannot all be oriented around mods. The content team, at the end of the day, is there to make internal content for ARK. The team associated with the support of mods is primarily technical. All these artists, all these level designers, and animators are here to make internal official content, so to speak. That’s what we’re doing. We have a big map release coming out in a couple of weeks. That includes new creatures and some new gameplay. We have a few surprises related to that down the official channel.
We still have to make official content in a very regular clip, but these premium mods keep the game fresh at an interval that would otherwise be impossible to meet or degrade the quality of our official content, meaning people can log into ARK: Survival Ascended every single day and find something new on the mod system and in the mod tab, they go in the mod browser in the game and they check the new releases every single day.
There’s always some new cool stuff that serves as a daily refresher for players who want to vary their experience. We would never be able to achieve that internally, as our releases are tempo releases, with more monthly or multi-monthly instead of daily content.
It kind of creates almost two different categories or tiers where people can find new content in ARK: Survival Ascended, but I don’t think either would work well without the other. There’s got to be those major tentpole official releases, and there’s also got to be these much more rapid creator releases. Both, I think, fulfill different expectations and needs on the part of players.
Shahar Sorek: I’ll add that 66 games take 80 percent of gamers’ time playing them. Gamers demand a constant output of content. It really helps a studio that there’s a constant stream of content going into the game, keeping the gamers in the game, not letting them drift towards other games and allowing for this very thriving ecosystem of content that keeps them engaged constantly. We’re in a very competitive landscape, with over 14,000 games released each year. You want to retain each gamer inside your game. This is probably the best way to do it.
Studio Wildcard is also working on ARK II, which, as far as we know, is still planned to launch late this year. Are you also going to allow these features, including premium mods, for the sequel?
Jeremy Stieglitz: As a developer, I believe for these kinds of live online service games, modding is essential. I wouldn’t make a game without this capability going forward if I had any choice in the matter because I think that otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for an impossible task of creating content at a pace that almost no developer can truly achieve and you’re stifling the creativity of your players. Not to mention, if you don’t give them this capability, they will mod your game anyway. They’re just going to have to do it with hacks and kind of reverse engineering, which is how a number of games get modded. But then you’re not going to have any way to actually capture that enthusiasm within the game and present it to the average player.
It’ll all just be like, go here, download the zip file, extract it, pray to God it works, hope there’s no viruses inside, etc. That’s not good for anybody. Either way, your game’s going to get modded; you might as well make it accessible to the casual user to experience those mods and be able to kind of capture that enthusiasm more within the game ecosystem and just have it exist externally.
If you’re not doing it for a live online game, then you are ignoring a huge potential magnet for players to continue playing and to stay in your game, as Shahar indicated. So, anything future that I do, we really need to have this as far as I’m concerned if it is an online game.
Finally, I wanted to step a bit away from the topic of premium mods and discuss the ARK animated series that launched a couple of months ago. Was the reaction to it as good as you had hoped?
Jeremy Stieglitz: I’m happy to talk about it. I love the animated series. I worked very hard on it. We came out with that in March, and it was critically very well received. IGN gave it eight out of 10. They said it’s the Jurassic World reboot; we need their quote. It was a lot of fun to do.
It expanded the world and lore of ARK and gave players a new way to get into it and feel immersed in that kind of story and setting. We do have plans to release part two of it soon, hopefully very soon. That is being wrapped up, part two, which kind of completes the current narrative that we had set out. It is in post-production, and then we’ll see. As far as the critical and fan response, it was great, and it was nice to finally get the first look at it. Hopefully, we’ll get to tell more stories like that in the ARK universe going forward, but I do think people will really like what they see with Part Two; it kind of pays everything off and really takes it to where it needs to go in terms of action and drama. So thank you for asking about that.
I’ve always wondered how you managed to get so much Hollywood talent on board. There’s Vin Diesel, David Tennant, Michelle Yeoh, Karl Urban, Jeffrey Wright, Russell Crowe, Elliot Page, Malcolm McDowell, Ragga Ragnars, Gerard Butler, Madeleine Madden, Alan Tudyk…
Jeremy Stieglitz: I’ll keep this one very short and simple. Everybody was stuck at home during the pandemic and they had nothing else to do. They were very bored, and they liked the scripts. We got the scripts to them and I think they were going a bit stir crazy at the time. Lucky us!
Thank you for your time.
