Have you encountered a bug, glitch, or hack while playing Steam’s hottest new dinosaur game? You might be sitting on $100.
ARK: Survival Evolved, a dinosaur survival game that’s been tearing up the top-selling charts for almost a month now, is trying something pretty unique for an Early Access game. One of the developers took to the Steam forums yesterday to announce a new scheme where players will be rewarded for finding exploits:
We offer $100 bounties for anyone who can provide us with hacks of any kind (which are NOT aimbots/esp/speedhacks) that can have an impact on gameplay or server stability on our official, online servers. Feel free to reach out to info@studiowildcard.com with details.
Already, one player has received cash through PayPal—the developers say the entire reporting process took about two hours before the player was compensated. I’m guessing that once reports start flooding in, the process might take a little longer.
Considering that ARK is in Early Access, and therefore is not done, it comes across as a bold move—surely, there are a number of things floating around, waiting to be reported. Cynically, one could view this as crowdsourcing quality assurance...but considering people are getting paid for their efforts, it’s hard for me to side-eye this. It reminds me of Google’s “Chrome Reward Program,” where they offer up to $50,000 to anyone that can find vulnerability in Chrome. That is to say: it’s a pretty cool system, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it.