In one of my previous posts I wrote about how studio Wildcard, the creators of ARK: Survival Evolved, excel in community engagement by hiring own fans and creators to produce additional content for the game. ARK is a survival-sanbox’y game where player (or players) can build settlements, tame dinosaurs, explore caves for artefacts and resources etc. This month studio Wildcard once again demonstrated that they are taking a studio-fan relationship on a brand new level:
Today we are proud and excited to announce the launch of the ARK Sponsored Mod Program. ARK has always viewed modding and the ARK Dev Kit as a very important aspect of our game. We want to look into ways to help our modders take their projects to the next step, be it through more robust capabilities in the Dev Kit, hosting competitions with large prize-pools, incorporating them into the game, or just generally working and partnering up with modders and their projects.
So there you go, Wildcard, will now be selecting 15 modders and paying them $4000 per month (each) for their work. Wildcard not only considers their fans as consumers but also business partners to some level. After all the fans will know the best what they enjoy the most and as such they can create some fantastic content.
We used to host a server for ARK which we called South Pacific Islands. I am definitely considering in launching it once again as so much of the new content was released very recently.
Hats off to Wildcard <3