One thing I've never understood about game devs is: why don't you pay modders peanuts to fill your game world with "little" things that add flavor and lore?

Take Stalker 2 as an example. The base game is fine (although has problems). But it feels empty most of the time. Why not pick people from the modding community, who would probably do it for free anyway, and get them to write up suggestions for "mini-content" that is then easy to put into the game? It would require no coding, only using existing tools and the base engine. Environmental storytelling, a note or PDA here and there, a small sidequest told via PDAs leading to a semi-unique (even useless, but sentimental value or just "cool") item. Some graffiti on a wall, a certain mutant spawning so you know it's THIS bloodsucker who killed this stalker's friends.

Some modders are geniuses too, so you could give them a freer hand. I bet a lot of these guys could bang out release-quality sidequests in a week. Or custom models/skins that would be easy to implement.

This solves the problem of tunnel vision by the devs. The devs are so focused on making the base game that they make it "broad and flat": basic functionality, but big empty areas. Modders excel at taking that base and saying "how can I tell a cool story with this little corner of the map, using only a few notes and graffiti on a wall?"

>>714764132 (OP)
> bro, could you make us some assets for free? you will have no rights to them and we will profit from it. It's a great deal bro! Think about community! You want this game to succeed, right?

>>714764132 (OP)
>why don’t game developers pay modders to work on their games
Because then they’d be game developers

>>714764348
I said "pay" in the first line. The point is, modders would probably accept relatively LOW pay, so it's an untapped resource.

But modders also do it for free already. They devote thousands of hours of their personal lives to souping up ancient games just for the accomplishment and the clout.

>>714764426
Yeah, exactly. Imagine if in the last year or demi-year of your dev cycle, you reached out to modders and worked with them for much less than it cost to code the base game (the really hard part) to add polish to the game.

>>714764564
> Yeah, exactly. Imagine if in the last year or demi-year of your dev cycle
Stop. That’s when they’re making the game. If they’re hiring people to work on the game before it’s released, it’s not ‘modding’, it’s game development.

> you reached out to modders and worked with them for much less than it cost to code the base game
Why would anyone accept that

>>714764761
Well I'm a modder and I'd accept it. I've often been playing a game and felt that an area was unnecessarily barren and brainstormed little environmental storytelling tweaks that could fix it in literally a few hours. If I had a pipeline to submit it to the devs I'd do it, probably for free but even better if I could get a few bucks and a shoutout for it. Sometimes I will do it for free, that's what making a mod is. I don't understand why this is upsetting for you. Modders ALREADY do this stuff for free, it just takes years to come out and exists in its own ecosystem. The basic premise of the OP is simple: is there a way to tap the creativity of modders, who often create amazing things purely out of love anyway?

You could even frame the question a different way. The devs of the original Fallout came up with a bunch of quests and lore by playing their own homebrew TTRPG in the office, and getting ideas from the storylines that emerged. Stalker 2 could have benefited from the devs not just making the base game, but thinking "how can we make this empty outpost cool?" and adding more notes, PDAs.

The idea is that 99% of the dev process is the hard parts: coding, testing, etc. But the extra 1% of just adding more relatively low-effort stuff would have an outsized impact. Players won't remember some minor gameplay tweak that took 3 weeks to implement, but they might remember a quest with a "named" bloodsucker they hunted down to get revenge for a stalker whose PDA they read. The question is simply, how do we get more content like that, with maximum efficiency?

Mostly talking past you to anyone who might actually understand what I'm saying but happy to hear your thoughts too.

>>714765109
> Well I'm a modder and I'd accept it
Slave

> playing a game and felt that an area was unnecessarily barren and brainstormed little environmental storytelling tweaks that could fix it in literally a few hours
That’s your opinion

> Stalker 2 could have benefited from the devs not just making the base game, but thinking "how can we make this empty outpost cool?" and adding more notes, PDAs.
Holy moly you are stupid

>>714765812
?

>>714766016
You’ve projected your consumer experience onto the process of game development, imagining a black box which after x time produces something called "the base game" which can then be released and onto which mods can then be appended and all they need to do is swap steps 2 and 3 and everything’s will be better. It’s stupidity.

>>714766547
Can you elaborate? What you're saying seems dumb to me.

Guy talks like modders are fae or something, you find them in your garden, share a loaf of bread with them, and then they do their modder magic to make everything nice and good.

>>714764509
> The point is, modders would probably accept relatively LOW pay, so it's an untapped resource.
Why would they if they're being hired for professional level work?

>>714766896
What I mean is, relatively low compared to some LinkedIn game dev who sees it as just another project. You'd still pay the guy fairly obviously, but at a commission rate perhaps.

Take someone like DDRJake. Loves Paradox games, plays them for free / as a streamer just for fun, and he's supernaturally good at them. He has a skillset that would be very hard to advertise for on LinkedIn. So they hired him as a tester, and he gladly moved to Sweden just to do it. But imagine if, instead of doing that, you just took the guys who made some of the legendary immersion mods for SoC and CoP and brainstormed ways to integrate their creativity into the design process of Stalker 2.

Like I said, another way of doing this is to try to REPLICATE that creativity. What I'm really aiming at here is: why is a game whose series is so famous for lore and environmental storytelling so barren? The will is clearly not lacking, the community is not lacking in ideas. There has to be a way to tap this resource.

>>714766827
Elaborate on what? You’re saying professional studios making games against budgets and deadlines and immense technical constraints should arbitrarily stop development when "the base game" (whatever that means) is complete then unpaid modders from who-knows-whete will come in and do who-knows-what for who-knows-how-long with their code, which can only then be released. It’s ridiculous.

>>714766879
Yep

>>714767206
No I'm not quite saying that. I would engage more but you're too shrill, you have that style of engagement where you cherrypick something and go "so you're saying _____? huh? huh?" If you can tone it down slightly I'm glad to talk though.

>>714767349
You don’t know what you’re saying, but that is functionally what you’ve proposed.