Games by Bethesda like Skyrim and fallout 4 are constantly having massive community projects where hundreds of people contribute to make full scale games. But you never see people willing to do the same thing for their own game. Why is that?
don’t get me wrong, I am in no way suggesting I want to do a project like that. But it is an oddity to me that the idea of making a large open source game never caught on.
i’m wondering if the skeleton for a large open world RBG was in place, along with a healthy vertical slice, That you could entice A Community to contribute.
They got marketing budget. And they are on the market for however long time, with various projects. Is not like they make their first project ever with 0 community.
They are very successful (or popular IP) games. People work on what they care about. They had a huge community that was engaged, it was easy to find people to work on it and get involved. People work on what they like. Conan is more fun and exciting than Generic RPG. There are even conversions for Colonial Marines which was terrible, but people love the franchise.
For example… battle for wesnoth, open arena and Eternal Summer.
Another example that comes to mind is Neverwinter 1 where there were thousands of community mods, packages, etc.
There are also Space Engineers (ugh).
To get community to do something, you need something to show, and that something must be already mostly finished. Basically, a game like skyrim is like already a finished castle, where you can add one more brick or rearrange furniture.
When you have an empty slate, however, you’ll have people with vastly different skills and ideas trying to build different things at the same, and those will clash. For example, one will be building flower picking simulator, while another would be building a gorefest experience or sex simulator.
Also, I see relying on community to fix your product as a somewhat dishonest move. I mean, they work for free while the developer is getting cash from sales. That’s not quite right.
It’s difficult to build big, motivated, self managing groups of doers
a) culture of social media has dramatically atomised everyone
Roblox exists, and is the direction for future sub-game creativity
2 a) Minecraft significantly changed digital expectations & behaviour
Over the next few years, we’ll see more “you can make it” efforts like Sony’s Dreams and Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage.
Eventually, one of these will be sufficiently generally capable, aesthetically on-trend and easy to publish and share with that what we now know as game engines will be considered merely frameworks.
In the meantime, one of the many massively funded efforts to create a meta-verse might stick and completely supplant this, turning us all into Second-Life-like zombies plugged in to be and do, see and think.
Without a popular intellectual property and an already engaged fanbase behind it that already shares a vision, you basically have nothing. Even if you had bleeding edge revolutionary tech but no well known IP, this would fail, because even if the tech could engage enough people, there wouldn’t be the shared vision what to make with that tech and it would fail in ways that have been described above.