Now here is something interesting. Studio Wildcard has revealed that it will be selecting 15 modders each and every month, and will pay them $4,000 in order to complete their mods for ARK: Survival Evolved. Each month, the mods will be evaluated and it will be determined if those modders will continue to be paid for the next month, or if a mod will be dropped from the program and a new one added.
As ARK’s lead designer, lead programmer, and co-creative director Jeremy Stieglitz told PCGamer:
“The hope is that with this kind of stipend, these authors, who really are hobbyists and have day jobs so they can’t really afford to spend as much time as they’d like on modding, that this will let them spend more time on modding, and ideally, hopefully, take some of these mods to completion.”
Ironically, ARK: Survival Evolved is far from being complete, yet the team is willing to pay modders $60,000 (in total) per month. Wow. Just… wow.
The man who will be deciding which mods make it into the new sponsored program, and determining each month if the mods will remain sponsored or be dropped and replaced by others, will be Cedric Burkes. Cedric is the creator of the Primitive Plus mod that has been adopted into ARK: Survival Evolved as official DLC.
Stieglitz claimed that ARK: Survival Evolved’s community will also get involved in this thing.
“Once we get this kind of process going, we’re almost certainly going to work out a community-driven aspect to is it as well, where the community maybe even ultimately can vote, along with some discretion, maybe, on Cedric’s part on who goes into that voting pool.”
Studio Wildcard will officially reveal this program during GDC 2017. It’s also worth noting that modders will have to upload their source assets to the ARK devs when entering the sponsored mod program, and that they must have the rights to all the assets that have been used in their mods.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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