Every game a platform? Pitfalls and opportunities in the gold rush for user-generated content

More than ever before, the games industry sustains itself on the backs of its players. Not only in terms of their time and their feedback, but in terms of their creative input as well.

All today’s biggest games, the likes of Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite, thrive on community creations, using bespoke toolsets, internal distribution systems, and financial incentives to encourage players to build new items, modes, and experiences within that game’s particular ecosystem.

In doing so, these games have become enormously profitable platforms, and a swathe of other games are rushing to incorporate user-generated content (UGC) into their own business models. Electronic Arts recently revealed that Battlefield 6 would release with a UGC ecosystem called Portal, while battle-royale pioneer PUBG is currently testing its own UGC tools.

On the face of it, it seems that UGC is where the big money in the games industry lies. But there is a fundamental misconception about the relationship between UGC and the success of a game. In most cases, it’s the latter which leads to the former, rather than the other way around.

“Fortnite [Creative] is built on the back of an incredibly popular game, right?” says Jordan Weisman, co-founder of Harebrained Schemes, co-creator of ShadowRun and BattleTech, and now CEO of Endless Adventures Incorporated. Weisman is currently developing Adventure Forge, a platform for designing narrative games.

“[Fortnite] built up and got this huge audience, and then in the wake of that, creates this UGC environment.”

Minecraft had a similar trajectory, initially becoming popular due to its survival mechanics. Roblox is the exception, having always been a creative platform first and foremost. But as Weisman points out, Roblox “had a ten-year history” before it became successful.

Follow the leader

Even when you have a successful game, incorporating UGC can pose a significant challenge. “Our first assignment is to catch up,” says Taehyun Kim, game director on PUBG: Battlegrounds, via a translator.

“For Battlegrounds, we were the first pioneers, so we were able to have that market share. [For UGC], we are not pioneers. We are followers.”

PUBG’s UGC tools are currently in an early testing phase. PUBG Studios aims to allow players to design their own game modes, customising rulesets, gameplay logic, and the shape and form of the world. Yet Kim is fully aware of the challenge they face to catch up with the likes of Epic’s Fortnite, hence why they’ve allowed players access to the tools at a relatively early stage.

“Right now, it’s in a really basic form,” Kim says. “We want users to make different content and play different styles. And our current system is not big enough to have that available.”

In addition, Kim believes that mimicking the approach of Fortnite Create might not be an appropriate solution for PUBG, owing to the differences in tone and mechanical emphasis between the two games.

“We want to dream big. But of course, we are such a ‘heavy’ game, so what [our players] want [from] UGC in this genre may be different,” he says.

“Fortnite is really casual. What they expect is [different] from what our own audience expects, so we want to [do] what they expect. I guess we need to find our own style and our own path.”

Tough start

Making a UGC game successful from the ground up, by comparison, is significantly harder.

The genre is littered with failed projects. Earlier this year, Build A Rocket Boy’s aim to build a player-created metaverse on the back of the linear cover shooter MindsEye fell at the first hurdle, while Hytale, a Minecraft-inspired building RPG, stumbled through the weeds of feature creep for years, ultimately leading to its cancellation by Riot Games.

One of the biggest challenges for UGC developers is designing the tools that players will use to build their experiences. Weisman points out this can be much more expensive than designing similar tools for internal use.

“There’s a big difference between a tool you make for your in-house use and a tool you put out for consumer use,” he says. “There’s a lot more tool development work and trying to bulletproof the tool as best you can for external use versus internal use.”

At the heart of this challenge is balancing the accessibility of the toolset with its power. In designing Adventure Forge’s toolset, which is built to enable players to create narrative games without needing to code, Weisman received some advice from Zach Phelps, the lead on Fortnite Creative and an investor in Adventure Forge.

“He said ‘accessibility is a problem, but it’s a short-term problem. Lack of power is a long-term problem’,” Weisman explains. “We really leaned into making sure that our creators had all the power we could provide them, and then incrementally keep improving accessibility.”

But providing users with the right tools is only half the problem. The other half is convincing players to engage. Not just with the tools, but with the experiences users create.

Games like PUBG and Fortnite have a huge, ready-made audience, which makes the investment in these tools worthwhile even if only a small portion of the user base engages with them. Smaller developers and devs starting from scratch cannot rely on this, so alternative solutions are required.

One option is to demonstrate the effectiveness of your tools by building a game with them yourself. This is the approach taken by Manticore Games, creators of the Core game creation platform.

Core released in 2021, attracting 3.5 million users during its first 18 months. But Manticore discovered there was a discrepancy between people coming to Core as creators and those looking for games to play.

“The thing with UGC is it’s a typical two side marketplace. You have to find a way to have great creators that create great content, and the players come and they love the games, and they stay, and they bring more players and creators,” says Frederic Descamps, who co-founded Manticore with Jordan Maynard in 2016.

“That flywheel effect is actually very hard to start, and we did very well with the creators, [but] with the players, I would say it was a little harder.”

This eventually led Manticore to build Out of Time, a rogue-like MMO that runs in Unreal Engine 5, but was built using the tools Manticore designed.

Manticore figured that building a game using their toolset could demonstrate Core’s effectiveness while also giving them a separate product to sell.

“As an independent studio, you have to be careful where you spend your resources,” Descamps explains. “We came up with a few hypotheses and a few ideas that we decided to test, and Out of Time came out of that. It was basically a way for us to use Core, and actually Out of Time is purely UGC.”

Agile creation

One intriguing facet of Out of Time’s development is its turnaround. Maynard says that the game was built from concept to launch-ready in two-and-a-half years, which includes a development reset 12 months in.

“The acceleration we get from using Core on top of just a base engine, I would estimate is 10x,” he says.

At a time when many AAA projects are taking five years or longer to develop, Maynard believes that tools like Core offer a potential solution. “UGC and professional game development – the lines are blurring,” he says.

“The actual experience of is interactive, so it sort of makes sense that the creation of it becomes interactive too, especially as the tools get better.”

Weisman, meanwhile, is taking a different approach. In addition to making the act of creation simple, Adventure Forge’s tools are designed to make the distribution of games easier.

Surfacing games and experiences both within and without UGC platforms can be difficult for players, with Weisman citing Lethal Company as an example.

“Lethal Company was a game developed in Roblox for two, three years. They honed it and it got a good mid-size following” he says. “[Then] they wanted to release it outside of Roblox, so they had to completely redevelop the game in Unity and put it out. And when they did, it sold, like, 12 million units.”

Like Roblox, Adventure Forge will have its own publishing ecosystem with a revenue share model, one that enables games to be published onto the platform with “one button press.” But it’s also designed so that any game made with it can easily be published on other platforms and devices.

“Our goal is to be looking for those gems that are developed inside of Adventure Forge and then reach out to those creators, and then we could publish their game for them externally,” Weisman says. “But if we don’t pick yours, or you’d rather do it yourself, you have that option. You’re not captured inside of the fortress of the application you’re in.”

Small is beautiful

It’s worth noting that not every developer with UGC tools is necessarily looking to become the next Minecraft. One such studio is Tuxedo Labs, the creators of voxel-based destruction sim Teardown.

On the face of it, Teardown seems ideally poised to become a major UGC-centric experience. It has a distinctive, sandbox-ish mechanical loop, custom, in-built modding tools, and an enthusiastic community creating everything from additional weapons and vehicles to unofficial campaigns.

Moreover, the studio is also currently working on a major update to add multiplayer support, which will include both cooperative and competitive modes. But according to CEO Marcus Dawson, Tuxedo Labs is cautious about Teardown’s UGC potential.

“We have tried to stay very open. It’s about the game you can play,” Dawson says. “We don’t go into monetisation and doing our own app store and things like that.”

Part of the reason for this is that Tuxedo Labs is still a very small team – around 14 people – and has little urgency to grow into a large studio. But Tuxedo Labs is also wary about betraying the spirit of Teardown.

“It’s a can of worms, like you see the App Store, how that [proliferated] and it can get from creativity into money grabbing,” he says. “Creativity is the important thing. And I think monetisation sometimes can really hurt the openness [of the] platform.”

“You don’t buy a sandbox if you don’t really know what it is”

Marcus Dawson, Tuxedo Labs

In addition, Tuxedo Labs also wants to pursue new projects, and doesn’t want to dedicate itself to servicing a single game. “If you have a really great, talented team, which I think I do…then you need to keep pushing,” Dawson says.

“[You can’t] create a magnificent game and then expect all the developers to sit on localisation and maintenance for ten years, because then you will lose the best developers.”

This isn’t to say Dawson is wholly against the idea of Teardown becoming a bigger prospect. If the upcoming multiplayer update results in a huge influx of new players, the studio will adjust accordingly.

If this doesn’t happen, however, then Teardown still exists as a dedicated single-player experience that players can pick up and enjoy whenever they like, just as games like Minecraft, Fortnite, and PUBG are fully featured experiences even without their UGC sides.

“You buy the game for the game,” Dawson concludes. “You don’t buy a sandbox if you don’t really know what it is.”

In short, you need a “cool game” first. “Then you can extend it to [be] something else.”