Studio Wildcard, the developer of ARK: Survival Evolved, has announced plans to begin paying modders of its game as much as $4,000 a month to help them finish the modifications. The best ones too, will become official, paid-for DLC for the game, potentially opening up entire career opportunities for some of the game's best modders.
Wildcard will pay as many as 15 mod teams up to $4,000 a month, with the mods rotating on a monthly basis, giving new blood the chance to finalise their content as older mods are completed. Some of the best ones however will end up as game DLC, much like Primitive Plus, a mod that was released for the game in 2016 as a free DLC update.
There is some concern of how the money will be split among teams, whether favoritism will become an issue considering some mods can focus on the same sort of features and the fact that some mods use copyright protected content in their creation. Regardless though, Wildcard hopes that its payments will help bedroom coders and artists to finish their mods and offer unique types of gameplay for ARK players.
"We ultimately feel that at the end of the day the modders that enter this program are kind of, you might say they're making a commitment, I guess, to handle that, to some extent," said Wildcard in a statement (via PCG). "When they sign up for this we do have them represent that they have the rights to all the work. They don't have to be closed source, but they have at least open source rights to the work. So, if there's some dispute, technically it's up to the modder to deal with that, at that point."
One caveat to the whole thing is what Wildcard calls its "insurance" policy. That is that by becoming part of the sponsored mod program, modders will need to upload all of their assets to Wildcard, including source files. That way, if the modders disappear in the future, Wildcard can continue to update them so that the game stays playable with all previously included mod content.
Do you think this sounds like a good idea? Or a return to Valve's attempt to monetise modding?
