Studio Wildcard was founded in 2014 and is based in Redmond, Washington, with a second office in Gainesville, Florida, though early press coverage simply called it a Seattle studio. Its co-founders came from very different corners of the industry: Jeremy Stieglitz had been creative director at Trendy Entertainment, the studio behind Dungeon Defenders, while Jesse Rapczak arrived as a veteran of Microsoft Game Studios and Sony Online Entertainment. Susan Stieglitz is also named among the founders, and Doug Kennedy served as chief executive during the studio's formative years. The team's first and defining project, ARK: Survival Evolved, entered Steam Early Access on 2 June 2015 and became one of the era's biggest early-access stories almost overnight: players woke up on a beach with nothing, learned to knap stone tools, and worked their way up to taming, riding and breeding dinosaurs in a shared open world where rival tribes could raid everything they had built. The full release followed on 29 August 2017 across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and Wildcard kept expanding the world with the paid expansions Scorched Earth (2016), Aberration (2017), Extinction (2018), Genesis Part 1 (2020) and Genesis Part 2 (2021). A game of that scale was not built alone; Wildcard worked with co-development partners including Instinct Games in Egypt, Efecto Studios in Colombia and Virtual Basement in the United States. The studio's early success was shadowed by a lawsuit Trendy Entertainment filed against Wildcard and Stieglitz in December 2015 over non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, a dispute that settled in April 2016 on terms that were never disclosed.
Wildcard's business structure is closely tied to Snail. Snail Games USA has held an exclusive license to the ARK intellectual property since November 2015 and co-publishes the series, and Wildcard's parent company, SDE Inc., is controlled by the spouse of Snail founder Hai Shi. Sister studio Grapeshot Games took the same technology to sea with the pirate MMO ATLAS in 2018. The original ARK reached the end of its official-server life on 30 September 2023, when Wildcard retired the official servers and handed players their save data so they could host their own; single-player, non-dedicated and unofficial servers carry on unaffected, which is why the game remains very much playable today. The studio's attention has since shifted to ARK: Survival Ascended, an Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original co-developed with Grove Street Games and Instinct Games, which entered Steam Early Access on 25 October 2023 and received its ARK: Lost Colony expansion on 19 December 2025, while ARK II, announced in December 2020, is currently targeted for 2028. Jeremy Stieglitz was still speaking for the studio as co-founder at the end of 2025. At PJ's Games the Studio Wildcard collection carries ARK: Survival Evolved for PC on Steam alongside its Season Pass, the pairing that opens up the expansion maps beyond the original island.
