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.
User-generated content (UGC) has become a new trend and a prospective area of investment in the game industry. 80 Level’s Instagram poll shows that 59% of people working in gamedev want to have UGC in their own games. The increasing interest in users creating content supports the fact that game creation and sharing platforms are reporting significant growth of daily active users.
To reveal the current state, difficulties, and prospects for the evolution of user-generated content in games, the 80 Level Research team conducted a series of interviews with experts from game dev studios and experts that work with UGC. You can find some highlights from our report down below. Don’t forget to download the full version of the report here.
UGC is beneficial to game developers due to the economy of scale (initial investment in the tooling for UGC and its maintenance pays off as the same system works for many creators). Another UGC bonus is the opportunity to use community forces without the need to hire. Amateurs with fresh perspectives can come up with great innovative ideas and solutions that big companies would’ve never thought of. Creators can improve a game and bring the main value for regular players — replayability. People spend a lot of time online and want more immersive experiences which can keep them entertained.
Easier recognition, accessibility for developing mods, and participation in a studio’s game creation process are the pillars of creators’ motivation. Creators are ready to experiment with Web2 and Web3 Metaverse platforms, which demonstrates their economic interest and the importance of gaining an immersive content creation experience.
Tobias Enholm, CEO & Co-Founder of Dims UGC platform:
The collaboration models between developers and creators include different stages of work with content: from optimization, scaling, and launch to marketing, distribution, support, to even overall management of creators’ properties across platforms. The developer/publisher may buy the rights to copyrighted content or pay a share of the sales to creators. Forms of support include giving creators a fair chunk of royalties, allowing them to move the content from one platform to another, and hiring them as independent contractors or actual employees of the company. This kind of collaboration greatly simplifies the recruitment process for game studios/platforms and, at the same time, it provides a great opportunity for developers to level up their resumes.
Scott Reismanis, CEO & Founder, ModDB, Mod.io:
The main challenges of UGC are technical and legal complexities. Developers face the problem of providing their platforms with moderation, security, and monetization tools to allow users to create content. The majority of large game studios don’t have special skills for building these processes and want to create their own content even if UGC is cheaper or free. There may also be a risk of plug-in incompatibility when implementing monetization on a platform. From a legal point of view, the interviewees noted the difficulties of arranging UGC payment processes. The reasons for it are the high overhead costs (requirement) and maintaining fairness for creators and enabling growth for users.
Even if a company manages to build a platform for UGC, another problem can appear - gamers’ reluctance to use it. There is a “network effect”: developers attract players to the platform through content creation, but players only choose services that already have content. So, the studio should make an effort to motivate people to use its platform.
Tal Shachar, CEO & Co-Founder, Infinite Canvas:
The question of content ownership becomes one of the central dilemmas as a consequence of the different interaction stages between developers and content creators. There are two perspectives on who the end owner of content created by one party and managed/promoted by another party should be. Some platforms do not recognize content creators’ legal rights or even own the majority of them (as well as users’ Intellectual Properties) (e.g. Roblox, Activision), whereas others do encourage and support content creators (Mod.io, Valve, Paradox).
A proposed way from informants to solve the question of legal ownership is an automated smart system that helps creators receive payouts legally and states all the details of such a partnership.
Kevin Østerkilde, Software Engineer, Algolia:
UGC creators are important to game studios, so there are ways to retain creators via monetization. Game studios offer payouts to content creators if their content is included in official releases or DLC. Additionally, the developer can upload their content to the game’s workshop and receive a share of its revenue. Game studios express interest in implementing mass payout solutions to UGC creators. Developers believe that content creators’ work should be rewarded.
User-generated content will become more widespread in the future and will be implemented in many games. There is a constant demand for content, and UGC will become a solution to satisfy it and prolong the lifespan of games. Interviewees predict that in 10 years, 5 of the top-10 games will be player-created. The popularity of UGC is growing, so individual creators will collaborate more with each other and create UGC more collectively. However, UGC probably won’t work for some AAA companies; some enterprise developers might want to sell their own content and have all the rights to UGC belonging to the studio, which is rather controversial for creators.
You can download the full report here.