You‘ve all been waiting for news on rentable servers for ARK on Xbox One. The wait is over: Xbox One servers are coming on October 25th, but some things will be a little different than other Nitrado servers – and we need to talk about them.

Update: Because there was an issue during Microsoft's certification of the client-side update needed to play on our servers, the release of rented servers for ARK on Xbox One has been postponed to early November by Studio Wildcard. Follow us on social media to always receive the latest information about this topic.

Many of you have been wondering why private Xbox One servers were delayed in comparison to PlayStation 4. Rentable servers are relatively new terrain for Xbox One, which means that much work had to be done behind the scenes, both on an organizational and on a technical level. On top of everything Microsoft and Studio Wildcard had to sort out, we also had a part to play:

By Microsoft's requirements, all services related to Xbox One games must be obtained through the Microsoft store, to provide a unified experience for all games and players. In simple terms: We are not allowed to rent out servers for Xbox One games through our website.

That means: Please do not charge your Nitrado account in anticipation of Xbox One servers! You will not be able to purchase Xbox One servers with your Nitrado account credit.

The Nitrado UWP App

To be able to offer Xbox One servers for ARK, we created our very own Nitrado app for the Microsoft store. When you order a server for ARK on Xbox One, it will still appear on our website, and it can still be managed through our smartphone apps. It‘s just that all purchases (new orders, extensions, up-/downgrades) will have to go through our Microsoft store app.

Having our own Xbox One app has its advantages: You‘ll be able to change your server settings right from inside the app! For now, this will simply redirect you to our web interface (in an already logged-in state), but for the future we want to fully integrate various features, to make managing servers even more convenient for Xbox One players.

However, with all purchases going through the Microsoft store, there‘s another important topic we need to talk about.

Prices

When asked about prices for console servers, we‘ve always said one thing: We don‘t charge higher prices just because we can – and with the enormous demand and the big success of console servers, we certainly could have. Instead, we‘re looking at our own costs, primarily hardware, and there‘s no need to charge higher prices when hardware usage is essentially the same.

You‘re probably already suspecting what‘s coming: When selling products through the Microsoft store, there is a percentage-based fee for every purchase. We won‘t crunch the numbers here, but if you‘re interested, the store terms are publicly available.

So now we‘re confronted with a choice: Either we reduce our costs, by employing older, cheaper hardware, sacrificing service quality, resulting in lag, disconnects, and crashes – or we increase our prices to make up for that store fee.

While we understand that not everyone will be happy with higher prices, we are convinced that absolutely no one would be happy with bad service quality. We strongly believe that our friends on Xbox One want and deserve the same, high-quality services that our customers on PC and PS4 are already used to.

That means: For Xbox One servers, we will adjust our prices to make up for the Microsoft store fee. There‘s also a bit of rounding we have to do, since the Microsoft store only allows fixed price tags (like $9.99, $10.49, etc.). Sometimes this is to our advantage, sometimes to yours, but on average it should even out in a fair manner.

It should also be mentioned that Microsoft does not use the same currency exchange rates for store prices that we use on our website. We have made manual adjustments for some currencies, but we might not have caught all outliers. If you feel like servers are overly expensive for your currency, feel free to contact us so we can check.

For full transparency, here‘s a list of the preliminary prices for the different configurations we‘ll offer within the Microsoft store app:

Update: The prices listed here have been updated to reflect a recent price reduction.

Slots (max concurrent players) USD per 30 days (plus applicable taxes) EUR per 30 days (including taxes) 10 13.99 13.99 20 21.99 21.99 32 34.99 34.99 50 53.99 53.99 70 74.49 74.49 100 98.49 98.49

We will also offer packages for 90 days of runtime, which will result in a discount (in comparison to 3 x 30 days) of roughly 10%.

These prices are still subject to change, but we felt it was important to inform you about the current status as soon as we could.

Preorders

We heard you, loud and clear: You don‘t want to press refresh all day on launch day, you want to put in a preorder and chill out until you receive an e-mail that your server is being installed. And that‘s exactly what we‘ll offer: We will publish our Microsoft store app before launch day, so that you can put in your orders early. Preorders will be processed in the order they‘ve been received in, each hosting location independently from the others.

We will also use this mechanism in case of temporary hardware shortages after launch, for example if we have a much higher demand at a specific hosting location than we anticipated. In these cases we will limit the number of preorders per location to a number that we can fulfil within a reasonable time frame.

That‘s it!

We hope we have answered many of your questions, but of course new ones will come up. Don‘t hesitate to reach out to us, and we‘ll do our best to provide answers as soon as we can.