More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Counter Strike, Warcraft 3 DotA, ARMA 3 PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Momentum Mod, … All of these were mods that became so big they became their own games.
If you’re strictly talking about platforms though, you need support from the original developers,or the source must be easily editable (like the minecraft java edition). At that point it becomes pretty common for huge mods to be made which eventually end up managing themselves. The problem is that you need a lot of money to actually make new feeling games. And developers can’t easily ask for money for mods, so development time is quite limited.
I am talking even lower. Like a made for modding framework that is totally open source. And yeah, that means games will end up with a somewhat common look and feel. But a lot of games end up that way anyway after mods. I am not sure that players need tons of unique games. I think they want games that are comfortable and replayable. In many cases they just want to hang out with friends, and the game itself is almost a pretext. Fortnight is actually a decent example of that. It leaned into that with lots of events that weren’t really much more than window dressing. But if it is completely opensource, you can end up with a ton of flavors to try and a lower learning curve for each.
Think you just described a game engine like Godot or Armory.
Ultimately that’s what you are describing there with such a free-form framework. The tools to make anything.
Even at a higher level engines like RPG maker and twine exist within genres.
And that isn’t a mod, so much as a game.
But going back to mods…
And why should that end up with a common look and feel? People have been modding the look and feel of games since the 90s.
Credentials: I made mods and maps in the 90s and commercial games in the 2000s.
Well, if you lower the barrier to entry. More people are likely to use the stock offerings. But that isn’t really a plus. Ideally the games would be visually different. But if you have a simple mechanic like inventory, it could and should generally be similar to others, unless that is what is supposed to be different about your game. W, a, s, d at least is pretty standard now. But it wasn’t always. I have noticed games solving the same problems as many other games, but doing it much worse. And clearly not by intention to be different, just because that wasn’t thier focus. So for those cases, it would improve those games.