Indie dev offers $100 hack bounty for Early Access game Ark

One of the developers of Studio Wildcard's Early Access dino-ridden survival sim Ark: Survival Evolved is offering to pay players $100 for reporting reproducible exploits and hacks that can negatively impact official servers for the game.

In a post on the game's Steam forums brought to our attention by Kotaku, an Ark developer claims to have paid the first of these $100 hack bounties to a player via Paypal after the player contacted Wildcard about an exploit that could potentially force game server crashes.

The developer publicly mulled over the idea of offering hack bounties over a month ago, but this is the first reported instance of the studio actually paying a player for bringing an exploit to its attention.

Though this kind of public bounty program is a relative novelty in game development, it's common practice for big tech companies like Google and Facebook, which expanded its bug bounty program to encompass Oculus VR last year.