Snail Games USA Inc. was incorporated in California on 22 September 2009 as the wholly owned American subsidiary of Suzhou Snail Digital Technology Co., Ltd., a Chinese game company that had spent most of the decade building online games for its home market, and it operates from headquarters in Culver City, California. The company is led by its founder, chairman and chief executive Hai Shi, who also founded Suzhou Snail and has been sole CEO of the group's holding company, Snail, Inc., since October 2025. Its early catalog leaned on that Chinese heritage, bringing the wuxia-flavored martial arts MMO Age of Wushu to Western players, but the turning point came in November 2015 when Snail Games USA secured an exclusive license to the ARK intellectual property and became co-publisher of ARK: Survival Evolved alongside developer Studio Wildcard. That dinosaur survival game, which grew from a 2015 early-access sensation into a full release across PC and consoles in 2017, became the company's defining property, and Snail now says ARK has passed 108.6 million console and PC installs through the end of 2025.
ARK's success let Snail build out a broader survival and sandbox catalog. It published Dark and Light, a fantasy survival game on the same technology, PixARK, a voxel-based spin on the ARK formula, and ATLAS, the pirate MMO from Wildcard's sister studio Grapeshot Games, and it has since added Last Oasis and Bellwright, both open-world survival games, along with Aquatica. Snail, Inc., the Delaware holding company formed in 2022, went public on NASDAQ under the ticker SNAL in November 2022, and the company is also publisher of ARK: Survival Ascended, the Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original game. Its former snailgamesusa.com address now lives at snail.com. For players, Snail Games USA's name on a box mostly means one thing: the ARK family, and the PJ's Games collection for the publisher carries ARK: Survival Evolved for PC on Steam, the game that started it.
