[cbg0]

The idea of compensating content creators worked extremely well for Valve for games like Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and Dota 2, since they can get access to a large talent pool with no investment. You have people creating assets for these games and getting a cut of profits, which is pretty cool, but on the other hand this means that Valve doesn't have to invest many man hours to create their own content for these games, effectively letting the community handle voting for new assets and approving the popular choices.

This can become pretty dangerous for games that will start popping up with relatively limited amount of content in them but with 'Infinite possibilities through modding', developers leaving it up to fans of the game to provide additional content, either free or paid. What happens when these assets or mods aren't maintained by the 3rd party that created them? Will the game developer simply remove these or maintain them?

[lsaferite]

Actually, in abstract the idea of a game with no 'game' but just engine with full mod support sounds interesting.

I guess that's what things like second life covered though.

One game that I love that has very little in the way of story is Don't Starve. It has a great mod system that uses Lua to provide so pretty amazing mods to the base game. Basically the entire game is written using the mod system with only the lowest level engine parts being compiled code.