The process of finding and eliminating bugs in a game before release is an arduous process and can cost developers and publishers a good deal of money in QA.

The developers of ARK: Survival Evolved thought of a unique way to go about eliminating bugs in the Steam Early Access version of ARK; paying players $100 for each gameplay-effecting bug they find and report to the developers.

The first $100 bounty was made good on today with the devs paying $100 to Steam user ZeroDay(++) for the reporting of an issue that could cause the game's servers to crash unexpectedly. After providing the team with the steps to replicate the problem, ZeroDay promptly had $100 deposited in his PayPal account.

The entire process was detailed in a post on the game's Steam Community Forums and an update is scheduled to fix the bug in question.

You can check out ARK: Survival Evolved in all its dinosaur hunting/riding glory on Steam Early Access, or when the game officially launches on PC, PS4, and Xbox One sometime next year.