At some point I hope this model evolves to engage content creators.
Clearly the biggest "draw" for these sorts of games is new content, and that is a sort of sunk cost with developers who pay people to create new content so that they can monetize it.
However, when it shifts into something like an MLM scheme where an "end user" can develop new content and then deliver it through the game engine, and then the game engine owner and person who developed the content "share" in the monetization (one by game sales etc, the other by in game currencies) then games like PoE and others can grow diversity without hiring.
The incentive alignment is pretty clear, really avid players can both improve their own playing experience (enrich themselves in game) by doing this, and the game developer gets more people playing because there is such an interesting mix of things to do an see.
At some point this evolves into market exchanges where people who can conceive compelling stories find others who are skilled at art or puzzle design and they can form a group for the purposes of delivering a bit of gameplay content that they share in the rewards from.
If you are having a hard time visualizing this, consider WoW for a moment. Let's say Bliz had a way for an avid player to "design" an NPC, write their back story, their interaction dialogs, and the quests they would give in the execution of their "story". An artist teams up with this person to provide textures for either an existing character type, or potentially designing a completely new kind of creature for this. All WoW quests have a fairly fixed set of game mechanics choices to work from so putting those together in ways that are interesting might be the role of a third member of this ad-hoc group. Once completing the story line you have access to a vendor NPC who will sell you various items for WoW gold (pets, spells, recipes, etc). If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling. That may be all the incentive they need. And Bliz gets a quest chain + vendor + content that enhances game play for all players and keeps it fresh.
Sort of like the virtual gig economy where players add content to the game in exchange for in game currency.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like Second Life, which launched in 2003 and is still running. (Incidentally, to tie it back to Genshin, Second Life recently banned gacha-style transactions on its platform [0])
I'm familiar with SL. And yes it has some of the elements of this, what it doesn't have (or didn't when I last looked at it) were constrained physics story lines and a questing model tied to in game currency. Mostly it was around converting "real" money to "Linden" Dollars[1] to facilitate in-game transactions.
[1] And at the time (2008) there were sites that would convert your Linden dollars back into cash.
> If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling.
There's have to be careful thought as to how this works, as the incentives might work out to a lopsided amount of content that maximized the thing that resulted in designer compensation.
Since the resources used aren't really an internalized cost in most cases, the NPC needs to be balanced against an idealized cost/value system that is often judgement based, meaning that a lot of work is required assessing if the designed asset is good for the system or not.
The simple example would be an NPC that if you walk up to grants you ten minutes of immunity for 1% of your wealth. Not only will something like that be extremely popular on it's own, if the designers get a percentage of the received gold, they are incentivized to make it always used. Maybe that means making it easily available almost all the time, and only taking 0.1% of wealth, so people use it even more often. But the real question is, does that break the game? The designers can be entirely motivated by profit, and not care about overall game function and health. The only way to combat this is to either carefully align incentives such as game health to function which is tricky (everyone might love the immunity boon for the first week and always profess to like it but end up playing less because of less challenge and engagement) or to have the game runners carefully assess and tweak all submitted proposals, at which point what you're getting from the public may not be worth it.
Maybe it would work if it was more just a nice kickback for contributing though. Design a module or something and submit to be accepted into core, and if it's accepted into the core you get a set amount of game currency which is predefined at certain amounts based on contribution, and a one time payout. Then the monetary incentive is to appease the game runners and provide something useful for the game, which aligns with any altruistic incentive to improve the game you're playing.
Its a fair point, and as I was saying in another response consider the "App Store" model where this new content is given to the internal team to review before releasing it. Clearly something that unbalanced the game like this would be rejected.
So Minecraft, Roblox, Rust, and other mod-friendly and sandboxed games are close to what you are describing. Centralized games like WoW is almost like the opposite.
In order to support custom content creation and integration, the game needs to have a specific type of asset and tooling pipeline that can be community-driven, something that's more or less determined at the conception of the game.
I agree with you in that we do need more big studios stepping in this direction. It takes guts for these CEOs and CFOs to say to their investors "Yes we will have first-class mod support, LAN support, and give the players the tools necessary to alter the game with their creativities."
> So Minecraft, Roblox, Rust, and other mod-friendly and sandboxed games are close to what you are describing.
Yes they are. There are also 'total conversions' in the gaming community where a game had nearly all of its assets replaced to become a new game. The pieces are all out there, but they haven't yet combined into a single thing yet.
We often think of ideas as being these amazing things that spontaneously spring into existence, however they are more often the amalgamation of a bunch of things that have emerged on their own and then contextualized in a way that unifies them into a cohesive whole. My thinking is that distributed game economies are going to be such things.
One of the early things about WoW was the emergence of "gold farming" which exploited legitimate game tools (questing, mailing gold to other players, in game transactions) and demonstrated you could earn real money off players by selling them virtual goods. Personally, I think that was the point when game product managers said, "Hmmm, that is money we could be making" and the "freemium" model was accepted as a legit model.
They still keep 'game flow' and 'game assets' in house however, but the curated app store model has shown business people how you can let third parties make stuff and then give them a platform to sell it and skim the profits. When you combine these two models in games you get this new thing.
That's a very interesting point about WoW. I was not a hardcore WoW player but I did play on and off in my high school years (Vanilla + Burning Crusade).
I remember selling 1000g for $50 USD at some point. Then a month later the average price for 1000g dropped to $15. It seemed like the price would eventually match the absolute lowest of 3rd world labor cost (until WoW tokens were introduced). So that pretty much aligns with your point of management finally giving in to the new model.
> the curated app store model has shown business people how you can let third parties make stuff and then give them a platform to sell it and skim the profits.
After being involved in both kinds of work fields (content vs platform), I can say that it's really a grass-is-always-greener-on-the-other-side thing. When we were making in-house contents we would think how nice being a platform is (no creativity involved, just skim off other people's success). But when we made our own platform, we often felt the insecurity of not having our own contents and people jumping ships. Plus, licensing headaches and dealing with lawyers became a norm.
The only kind of platform that doesn't have this issue is one that is a near monopoly (cough App Store). Netflix, after realizing the rise of their competitors, went to town with in-house productions and declared "Content is King".
Clearly the biggest "draw" for these sorts of games is new content, and that is a sort of sunk cost with developers who pay people to create new content so that they can monetize it.
However, when it shifts into something like an MLM scheme where an "end user" can develop new content and then deliver it through the game engine, and then the game engine owner and person who developed the content "share" in the monetization (one by game sales etc, the other by in game currencies) then games like PoE and others can grow diversity without hiring.
The incentive alignment is pretty clear, really avid players can both improve their own playing experience (enrich themselves in game) by doing this, and the game developer gets more people playing because there is such an interesting mix of things to do an see.
At some point this evolves into market exchanges where people who can conceive compelling stories find others who are skilled at art or puzzle design and they can form a group for the purposes of delivering a bit of gameplay content that they share in the rewards from.
If you are having a hard time visualizing this, consider WoW for a moment. Let's say Bliz had a way for an avid player to "design" an NPC, write their back story, their interaction dialogs, and the quests they would give in the execution of their "story". An artist teams up with this person to provide textures for either an existing character type, or potentially designing a completely new kind of creature for this. All WoW quests have a fairly fixed set of game mechanics choices to work from so putting those together in ways that are interesting might be the role of a third member of this ad-hoc group. Once completing the story line you have access to a vendor NPC who will sell you various items for WoW gold (pets, spells, recipes, etc). If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling. That may be all the incentive they need. And Bliz gets a quest chain + vendor + content that enhances game play for all players and keeps it fresh.
Sort of like the virtual gig economy where players add content to the game in exchange for in game currency.