I read the article Kupek linked and that reminds me of one of my earlier discussion about why there isn't some kind of unified gaming framework/toolbox/whatever. Well I thought about some more. It will only be good for the betterment of gaming, but a comprehensive toolbox wouldn't exactly help the guys who released it. Let's say Capcom released some kind of Megaman Framework. Given that people can hack MM2 and MMZ3 with whatever they're using and create new stages/characters, one would assume creating another Megaman game with the actual tools cannot be very hard.
But what good is that for Capcom? Let's say 5 guys got together and made Megaman Y and it was a great game. Well I assume if they try to sell it they'd get hit by a Cease & Desist. Even if you do it for free, you might still get hit by a C&D anyway if you did something Capcom doesn't like (like if X turned out to be a bad guy). Now even if you have no legal problems whatsoever and you don't care about money, so you released Megaman Y. Now when Capcom releases Megaman Need More Money 9, people are going to say why does Capcom charge us $15 for this when Megaman Y is free and better? After all, most of the recent Megaman games are just cheap moneygrabs. It cannot be hard to have better graphics than MM9, and MMZX series is absolutely nothing special. I'm not a big fan of crowdsourcing but it is very hard for me to imagine the Megaman community cannot create a better game than any of the recent Megaman games released in the last 5 years, minus MMZ3.
Blizzard has a pretty comprehensive toolbox with the Warcraft 3 scenario editor. But it's not clear to me if the custom games generates anything useful for Blizzard. Tower Defense and DOTA both had their roots in Warcraft 3, but Tower Defense now is a stand alone game people can sell for money. I'm not sure about DOTA but I'd think people can commercialize it too. The fact that Warcraft 3 spawned these two sub genres doesn't seem to help Warcraft 3 itself. Now Blizzard probably don't care too much since the genres are non-conflicting, and obviously they probably gain some from people playing Warcraft 3 for DOTA/Tower Defense. But you can clearly get into a situation where the returns are negative. I believe Team Fortress started out as a mod for Half-Life. What if these guys who made the mod decided to sell the rights to Id? Would that turn the FPS landscape around? I don't know, but it at least looks possible.
Now I'm guessing in the case of Counterstrike they just paid the guys who came up with the mod so all it works out okay. But that seems to be pretty rare in the case of a game developer to its mod community. Most of the time it seems like C&D is the norm.
I think the only way scripting can work is if there's also some kind of model for revenue sharing. If I made Megaman Y and it turned out to be a great game, maybe Capcom should license Megaman Y as a $5 add on and throw in $1 for the ability to play as Omega, and someone smart can figure out how to split the profit. Obviously you need some way to measure how popular a mod is, but that shouldn't be very difficult.
But what good is that for Capcom? Let's say 5 guys got together and made Megaman Y and it was a great game. Well I assume if they try to sell it they'd get hit by a Cease & Desist. Even if you do it for free, you might still get hit by a C&D anyway if you did something Capcom doesn't like (like if X turned out to be a bad guy). Now even if you have no legal problems whatsoever and you don't care about money, so you released Megaman Y. Now when Capcom releases Megaman Need More Money 9, people are going to say why does Capcom charge us $15 for this when Megaman Y is free and better? After all, most of the recent Megaman games are just cheap moneygrabs. It cannot be hard to have better graphics than MM9, and MMZX series is absolutely nothing special. I'm not a big fan of crowdsourcing but it is very hard for me to imagine the Megaman community cannot create a better game than any of the recent Megaman games released in the last 5 years, minus MMZ3.
Blizzard has a pretty comprehensive toolbox with the Warcraft 3 scenario editor. But it's not clear to me if the custom games generates anything useful for Blizzard. Tower Defense and DOTA both had their roots in Warcraft 3, but Tower Defense now is a stand alone game people can sell for money. I'm not sure about DOTA but I'd think people can commercialize it too. The fact that Warcraft 3 spawned these two sub genres doesn't seem to help Warcraft 3 itself. Now Blizzard probably don't care too much since the genres are non-conflicting, and obviously they probably gain some from people playing Warcraft 3 for DOTA/Tower Defense. But you can clearly get into a situation where the returns are negative. I believe Team Fortress started out as a mod for Half-Life. What if these guys who made the mod decided to sell the rights to Id? Would that turn the FPS landscape around? I don't know, but it at least looks possible.
Now I'm guessing in the case of Counterstrike they just paid the guys who came up with the mod so all it works out okay. But that seems to be pretty rare in the case of a game developer to its mod community. Most of the time it seems like C&D is the norm.
I think the only way scripting can work is if there's also some kind of model for revenue sharing. If I made Megaman Y and it turned out to be a great game, maybe Capcom should license Megaman Y as a $5 add on and throw in $1 for the ability to play as Omega, and someone smart can figure out how to split the profit. Obviously you need some way to measure how popular a mod is, but that shouldn't be very difficult.
