RimWorld Engine Licensing, similar to Unreal Engine
.. Pretty random musings. I tried to make an acct on Ludeon Studios forum to post this - but it looks bugged - it wouldn't let me create an account. So reddit it is.
I was playing 'Going Medieval' - and it just made me want to play a medieval rimworld mod. (I'll go do that after this post!) A bunch of UI's are 1:1 clones of rimworld UI's. There are so many QOL issues in 'going medieval' - I just couldn't get into the game. What is frustrating is, they're all the same QOL issues, we had in rimworld. It made me wonder if mod developers + game developers would 'use the rimworld engine' if that was an option. Instead of re-inventing the wheel. Similar to how people use the unreal engine to build FPS games.
As a bit of a thought exercise - I'll pick zombies as an example:
If someone wanted to make a zombie survival game. Building graphics, inventory, audio etc .. from scratch in Unity is a big lift. But obviously making a 'mod' is straight forward. But mods have some large limitations.
What does the zombie mod side look like? I have never played a zombie mod. I don't see any 1.5 zombie mods. Finding a good working one on steam's workshop isn't straight forward. There is Zombieland 1.4 - which reddit says is the best zombie mod. It does look very good, a million times better than anything I could make. I can't ask if it will be updated for 1.5 on steam, and I don't want to join discord to ask just for this post. The author's monetization is via patreon. Ultimately this mod has 120k subs (out of 4m? rimworld sales on steam?). Presumably the incentive to update the mods is reasonably low and based on passion.
Get hypothetical RimWorld Engine. Building the game is a spectrum - it could be as simple as modding or as complex as making extensive changes to the Unity engine portion. Add a title screen, menu, ending screen. Viola - ZombieRimWorld, $5 on steam. When people launch the game. Brought to you by Rimworld Engine, etc. People searching for a zombie survival game, find ZombieRimWorld, etc.
For other genres, like medieval - things are murky. Reddit discussions talk about loading a bunch of different mods and which settings to tweak, etc.
Why not mods? Top level game is going to just be better in some ways.
Discovery - If I search for zombie survival on steam. I won't find mods for rimworld. But I would find top level games. This is a driver for why the workshop numbers are seemingly lower than expected.
Accessibility - Even if I find a mod, finding one the right version, and installing mods is not easy. People in this sub can do it, but casual gamers can't. They're not going to install multiple mods and debug breakages, etc. They don't want to figure out a bunch of settings. They want to download a game and play.
For developers - Game developers aren't going to write a mod and rely on patreon, they're going to start over and write an engine (see 'going medieval'). .. but I don't think they need to.
For mod developers - Better monetization options, they don't need to rely on patreon. If they have more incentive to build high quality things and support them - they'll do that. And players will get better experience.
Why would Ludeon do this?
'Open source'-ish (unreal is source available not open source) - leads to a community making the engine better. You can get a community of people fixing bugs and adding features - for free.
Seems aligned with Tynan's interests. What's better than a story generator? A story generator generator. (.. I think we can go deeper)
Different monetization channel
What about Unity Licensing?
- Obviously people selling a hypothetical game like this need to pay both Ludeon and Unity.
So many problems
Turning the current game into something people can build on top of like this is really complicated. On the code side - and on the licensing side.
Low quality crap games - right now the workshop is a graveyard of mostly crap with a bunch of amazing gems. You wouldn't want people to easily be able to publish crappy games they walk away from.
But .. I don't want to pay - I like free mods. I like free mods too. But I also like good games - I don't think one cannibalizes the other (unless you're into that)
TLDR - A full engine/licensing is probably not realistic. Maybe some middle ground?
Some way to wrap mods into a higher level 'bundle'. Some curated 'game modes' or 'setting' - sort of like story tellers. ex> Classic Rim, Zombies, Medieval, Magic, Foo, etc. Maybe community builds them and Ludeon can curate them?
Ludeon curates hypothetical games and let's people release them.
Third party authored DLC that run on top of the game. Maybe Ludeon can do some revenue split.