The 80 Level Research team conducted a series of interviews to learn more about the current state, difficulties, and prospects for the evolution of user-generated content in games.
Tobias thinks that the reason why there is such a huge interest in the UGC niche is that many people spend a huge part of their time online, and there is a need for experiences and content on every level.
It is profitable to have a community that creates content. As the respondent said, “the economy of scale.”
True innovation comes from creative communities, where mods prolong the life of games, but the potential of UGC is not fully revealed as it is difficult to bring innovation to the game on top of everything.
Studios often recognize amazing creators from their community, and that's how a lot of people got their job in this industry. Today, if a game studio wants to commercialize content, the safest approach is to start working directly and officially with their mod creator community. It means using something like mod.io - a solution that’s designed to build a bridge between a studio and its creators, offering everything from integration with their plug-ins, to a custom-built monetization service.
It's technologically difficult to build a platform that allows people to create, distribute, and monetize their creations. This platform also has to have moderation and safety tools to ensure that people aren't being taken advantage of and that they're not creating things that would violate various terms of service or certain social mores. This is a very big challenge for developers.
It's not only difficult from the technology standpoint, but also from the legal side. It's hard to come up with the right rules for handling the payment process (whether it should be done through some legal entity or individually). It’s hard to define what's fair and what will allow people to grow and succeed.
The relationships with creators are organized differently, depending on the company. As an example, Valve has an SDK that can be publicly downloaded and be the base for mods. On the other end of the spectrum, there are companies that are against modding, Activision being one example of this. The third view can be described by the example of Microsoft and Halo. You can create a Halo mod, as long as you're not using any of Microsoft's assets. If you recreate them from scratch instead, then you can upload them.
Companies can use a monetization system or platform like mod.io to decide the rules for how content is going to be commercialized. There are a number of business models that apply to that, whether that be patronage or a UGC marketplace. They could also incorporate modded content into a season pass or the next DLC update, then pay the creators who contributed to that package.
Creators are incredibly important to game studios, and this value can be multiplied exponentially if monetization is available for the creators. This allows the creators to act in a more professional capacity, thus creating better content over longer periods of time. Monetization enables UGC creators to stay in a gaming ecosystem while continuing to grow and expand it – in partnership with the studio.
Tal is assured that UGC is going to be a huge driver of growth for the industry as a whole. The reason why we're seeing more and more people and developers open up to these types of tools and creative abilities is simply that there's a lot of creativity and talent in the world.
Lots of people could make amazing experiences or content, they just didn’t have an opportunity to do it before. When you give people the tools and make it easy for them to create and distribute their content, they can come up with stuff that a big company might not have ever thought of.
Platforms will have to balance their own interests and the interests of creators and players. There’s going to be a lot of experimentation. Shachar hopes that creators will continue to own and retain more and more control over their IPs