{"title":"Instinct Games","description":"\u003cp\u003eInstinct Games S.A.E. was founded in 2011 in the Heliopolis district of Cairo, Egypt, by Mostafa Hafez, who remains its founder and chief executive. Hafez brought unusual engine-level pedigree to a region with few established game studios: he co-developed the Reality Engine, the middleware technology later sold to Epic Games, and before Instinct he led Artificial Studios and Timeline Interactive. That low-level engineering background shaped the studio's identity as a technical co-developer rather than a publisher-facing brand, and its team, in the 11 to 50 range, has spent most of its life working inside other studios' games. The relationship that put Instinct on the map was with Studio Wildcard: the Cairo team did engineering work on ARK: Survival Evolved through its 2015 Steam Early Access launch and beyond, and Hafez himself has been described as a designer and lead programmer on the game, contributing to the systems that let hundreds of creatures, tribe-built structures and player-driven combat run in a single persistent world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat partnership never ended. When Wildcard's sister studio Grapeshot Games launched the pirate MMO ATLAS in 2018 on the same technology, Instinct Games was credited as a co-developer on Steam, and when Wildcard rebuilt its flagship as ARK: Survival Ascended in Unreal Engine 5 in 2023, Instinct was again named alongside Grove Street Games as co-developer. That makes Instinct Games one of the few studios to have worked on both generations of ARK's technology, and one of the most visible examples of an Egyptian developer contributing engineering to a globally successful PC game. The PJ's Games collection for Instinct Games carries ARK: Survival Evolved for PC on Steam, the original game the studio helped bring to life.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"ark-survival-evolved-steam","title":"ARK: Survival Evolved","description":"\u003cp class=\"lead\"\u003eARK: Survival Evolved drops you onto the shore of a mysterious island with nothing but your bare hands and a strange implant in your arm. Dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roam the jungles, mountains and oceans around you, and every one of them is either a threat, a meal or a future mount. Studio Wildcard's open-world survival game asks you to hunt, harvest, craft and build your way from a lone survivor shivering by a campfire to the head of a tribe with an army of tamed creatures at its back.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eSurviving the Island\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe ARK does not care whether you live. Hunger and thirst tick down with every action, weight slows you, and the day-night cycle and shifting weather push the temperature toward frostbite or heatstroke depending on where you have wandered. Berries and raw meat will keep you alive for a while, but real progress comes from fire, shelter, cooked food and clothing suited to the climate, all governed by a proper insulation system that separates a snug hut from a windswept cliff.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEverything you make is crafted from Blueprints with variable quality, and everything wears out with use. Experience earned by simply doing things levels your character and unlocks Engrams, permanent recipes you keep even after dying. Die you will, and when it happens your body and everything it was carrying stay where you fell, waiting to be recovered by you or looted by someone else. When you log out, your character sleeps in the persistent world, so a safe bed matters more than in most games.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eTame, Breed and Ride\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMore than 100 creatures can be tamed, and the process is the heart of the game. You weaken a wild animal until it collapses, then feed and guard it, sometimes for hours, until it wakes up loyal. From there each tame levels up, carries inventory and armor, follows commands, and in many cases can be saddled and ridden directly. A few examples of what that opens up:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped peaks to scout new territory, or use a larger flyer to lift allies and supplies straight over an enemy wall.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRun with a pack of Raptors through the jungle, or tromp through a rival base on the back of a Brontosaurus with a platform saddle strapped to its spine.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eChase down prey from the saddle of a raging T-Rex, then bring the kill home on a beast of burden strong enough to carry a whole settlement's worth of resources.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTamed pairs can be mated, and their offspring inherit stats and colors through a genetic trait system that rewards patient breeders across generations. Eggs need incubating at the right temperature, mammals need gestation time, and babies of both kinds need feeding around the clock. Raising a line of superior Rexes is a project in itself, and one of the most satisfying in the game.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eBuild, Farm and Fortify\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChop down forests and mine metal to craft the parts for sprawling multi-level bases: foundations, ramps, pillars, windows, gates, trapdoors, water pipes, generators, wiring and a whole catalog of electrical devices. Structures use a real load system, so a base whose supports are destroyed will come down in pieces, and reinforcing it properly is worth the effort. Every wall, sign, weapon and piece of gear can be painted, so your tribe's base and colors become recognizable across the server.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFarming sits alongside the building. Gather seeds from the wild, plant them in crop plots, water them and feed them fertilizer (everything on the ARK produces compostable waste, and some of it is better than others). Crops feed you and your herbivore tames, and rare fruits go into recipes and tonics that push your stats when it counts. A vegetarian survivor can genuinely flourish here, and it is possible to conquer the ARK without ever swinging a blade at another player.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eTribes, Bosses and the Truth of the ARK\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eForm a Tribe with friends and everything becomes shared: tames answer to any member, respawns can happen at any tribe bed, and admins can hand out access to storage and gates. Whether your neighbors become allies or targets is entirely up to the people on the server. Knocking out and capturing rival survivors is a legitimate strategy, and so is feeding them to your carnivores.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe endgame lives at the Obelisks. Gather enough rare tribute items and you can summon one of the ARK's god-like creatures for a boss fight that demands an experienced tribe and a trained army of tames, with valuable progression items on the line. Along the way, collectible Explorer Notes left by survivors from across the millennia piece together the backstory of the island and hint at what the ARK actually is, and why you are on it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eWays to Play\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cdl\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eSingle-player and local sessions\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003ePlay alone in a private world with every server setting under your control, or host a non-dedicated session so a few friends can share your ARK. Characters and items can be moved between single-player and unofficial servers, so nothing you build has to stay in one place.\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eCommunity multiplayer\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eStudio Wildcard shut down the official ARK: Survival Evolved servers in September 2023, so the official network and its themed event ARKs are no longer available. Tens of thousands of player-hosted and unofficial community servers remain active, with persistent characters, bases and tames, and you can run a dedicated server of your own with the rules tuned however you like.\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eMods and custom maps\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eFull Steam Workshop support and a customized Unreal Engine 4 editor have produced one of the deepest modding scenes in the survival genre, from quality-of-life tweaks to entire new maps and creatures. You can also generate your own Procedurally Generated ARKs for a fresh island whenever you want one.\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003c\/dl\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBacked by dynamic lighting, volumetric clouds and a score by Ori and the Blind Forest composer Gareth Coker, the ARK is a place that rewards curiosity as much as caution. Light your first campfire, learn which creatures to run from and which to knock out, and start building the tribe that will one day stand at the foot of an Obelisk. The island is waiting to find out what you are made of.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Wildcard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":28003052224598,"sku":"PC_3517168910422_DL_GL","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0875\/3268\/files\/card-ark-survival-evolved-pc-mac-steam-game.jpg?v=1789508835"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.pjsgames.com\/en-ie\/collections\/instinct-games.oembed","provider":"PJ's Games","version":"1.0","type":"link"}