A survival game drops you into a hostile world, usually an open one, with minimal equipment. To stay alive you have to find resources and manage needs such as hunger, thirst, illness or your character’s state of mind. These games are generally open-ended and have no fixed goals.
The core mechanics
- Gathering and crafting: combining resources creates tools, weapons and other items, which often wear out with use
- Meters: health plus other needs, such as the hunger and sanity meters in Don’t Starve
- Building: shelters or large structures, as in Minecraft
- Death: some games use permadeath, while others let you respawn and recover your equipment
- Worlds: many are randomly or procedurally generated
Alone or with others
Many survival games can be played online on persistent servers. When players only face the environment, it is called PvE; when they can also fight each other, PvP. It is common to form alliances and build fortified bases.
Where the genre came from
Survival elements are almost as old as video games, but the genre took shape in the 1990s and early 2000s with games such as UnReal World (1992). Minecraft, publicly released in 2009, is considered the game that popularised it, and DayZ began as a mod for ARMA 2 in 2012 before becoming a standalone game. By 2017, survival games earned over 400 million dollars in just six months, according to SuperData.
It is not survival horror
Survival horror is a related but separate genre: its focus is surviving a supernatural or terrifying setting, while survival games revolve around resources and open-ended survival.
Frequently asked questions
What do you do in a survival game?
Gather resources, craft tools and weapons, keep your needs such as hunger and thirst under control and, in many games, build a shelter.
Is a survival game the same as survival horror?
No. Survival horror focuses on surviving a frightening setting; survival games focus on managing resources in an open-ended world.
Which game popularised the genre?
Minecraft, publicly released in 2009, is considered the game that popularised survival games.
This article was written with AI assistance from the sources linked above.
