LogInXbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus fees were revealed in a legal filing.
It has been revealed that Sony Interactive Entertainment and Xbox paid millions of dollars to add the ARK games to their game subscription services.
The information was first spotted by Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach who noticed that an SEC filing by Snail Games USA, the owner of ARK developer Studio Wildcard, reveals the values the two companies paid to feature the ARK games in their subscription service game catalogs.
According to the document, Sony paid $3.5 million to make ARK: Survival Evolved available in March 2022 PlayStation Plus games for PS4 during the period from March 1 to April 4.
Microsoft previously already had a three-year license agreement with Snail Games to feature ARK on Xbox Game Pass. The deal was first signed in 2019 and scheduled to last until 2021 but was later extended until June 30, 2022 – to keep the game on Microsoft's subscription for the first half of this year, the company paid $2.5 million, as the filing reads.
In addition to the $2.5 million, Microsoft also paid $2.3 million to guarantee that the game’s Vin Diesel-starring sequel, ARK 2, would be available on Xbox Game Pass for three years after it's released next year.
Platform holders like Sony and Microsoft do not traditionally reveal anything about their agreements with developers for their game subscription services. While this latest reveal can be not representative of a standard agreement, it is one of the first cases that provide insight into the financial backend of how the processes work.
Earlier, it was also revealed that Xbox paid $600,000 to add Big Cheese Studio's Cooking Simulator to the Xbox Game Pass subscription.
You can find an SEC filing by Snail Games here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.