Keeps you thinking why Valve, Id and Blizzard and even Activision lets them tweak their engines and programming by amateur programmers. LOL. Theres a answer though because even how much Sean malstrom makes opiniated theories and speculations HE KNEW UGC(mods and maps and skins in CS and other FPS) was the future of traditional gaming thus, ending the videogame industry as we knew it. Im always observed Malstrom and his views he wants arcade and simple type experience and yet he calls Wii Sports and Wii play spin off a retard game even some games improved on the genre  and give it new content like rabbids and Carnival games. He even says emmersion and story type games are over and its from the old values.

So lets see now, what traditional games thats not in emmersive and story type value? OH I know its platformers, RTS and FPS. It doesnt matter  if the mod(not UGC said so by Malstrom) changed the gameplay of the game itself as long as theres new maps, skins and weapon skins the community was happy. In fact, thats what DLC is all about. NOW anyone get me? And the bonus fact that he spends more time on his PC and play RTs than consoles suspects what Malstrom's intentions really are. He was afraid... and he hides it by attacking the core gamers with his articles and Wii revolutonized gaming. But in reality he was hoping Ninty to go on with the casual revolution and Nintendo dont want to bother with traditional games again.

He dont want the console gaming to become like the Pc gaming. He even says that graphics doesnt matter anymore, another sign of being afraid. Since mods and amateur programmer needs no fancy graphics to make a new game or maps and skins to satisfy the user. too bad UGC was here to stay and SONY and Nintendo will lead the way. Especially Nintendo. Nintendo dont care for traditional games which relies on old values theyre more focus on the new values so modders and mappers can just hack, tweak and chage the gameplay and stages of their existing platformers they dont care. Same as other FPS companies done on their games.

"One of the biggest ways to spot a Technocrati is if he or she believes society is going to change because of a product or technology. Technocrati believe technology is in the driver’s seat, not Human Nature. Another way to spot Technocrati is their incredible lack of discussing customers. Customers are not interesting to them.......... The Technocrati do not take consumers seriously. Either they are idiots or they are Luddites to “progress”. Consumers, to the Technocrati, often end up being seen as obstacles to overcome."

I couldn't help but think of EA and Dead Space: Extraction.

I won't say every technocrat is a tweaker/hacker/modder/fiddler/author.  But, these people are usually technocrat(i), particularly if they elevate their opinion of life to be superior to people who aren't as dedicated as them, and have knowledge bases in other area.  Individuals who come to and ask why you haven't coverted your laptop over to Linux, and so on, fit into this.  My mention of tweakers, etc... was in reference to user generated content.  The non-hardcore just consume the content.  They don't created, nor do they have an interested in creating it.  An estimate of what I saw was that 90% of a community are consumers of content, rather than producers.  I don't count giving feedback as creating content, merely providing input to the creators.

Anyhow, I believe a useful insight here is to take what Malstrom wrote, and take other opinions here, and have these as points of insight:

1. Community ownership of a product is key to its success.  This ownership is more than just the acquiring of it, but the ability for the community to tweak it as it sees fit, and also involves transfer of ownership over to someone else.

2. In a community, most people are end users.  They rely on others to do tweaks needed.

3. A small percentage of the community produce content, do tweaks, and make sure everything works, to meet the needs of the community.  These individuals need and desire mod tools.

4. Focusing too much on the small percentage that does tweaking, as the end all and be all, is to ignore the needs of the consumers in the community, which is most of the users.

I think he's overestimating UGC here. LBP and Wii Music came and went, but we're not seeing that much more of a push towards UGC since their arrival. Still just a trickle of such games in the post-LBP world: Minis March again, Kodu, Boom Blox Bash Party, but little else.

yushire, you are simply mixing two different things. UGC doesn't have anything common with modding.

The UGC that Malstrom hates is the idea that developers could just release "construction sets", and "editors" instead of games, and the gamers will all entertain themselves by creating stuff,(more like putting stuff together) or by watching others' stuff.

Modding is popular, because the base games themselves are popular, people love them, and some talented people love them so much that they even make meaningful, enjoyable content for it, also using their programming skills to make it surprising.

UGC games like Wii Music or Spore fail hard, because they rely on "here is an empty game, do something.". For example in Spore, (the one I'm familiar with), there are hardly enough talented fans to create meaningful content, but even if there would be, it would be anything but meaningful. They could basically change the location of the body parts on a creature, or the coloring of a house. No one will feel thrilled for exploring an universe full of purple box houses, yellow pyramid houses, green box houses, yellow sphere houses, spotted pyramid houses, spotted box houses, and lots of penis creatures. (seriously, lots of them.)

They would rather pay for professional content, or even semi-professional mods.

@WereKitten
I disagree, he doesn't use straw-men at all. The positions of some people/groups tends to be ambiguous and as so leaves it open to interpretation. He can only guess what their position is and I think does a very good job of it.

Customer reception has a lot to do with behaviorism. If you are wrong about customer habits then your product/service will not be well received. Nobody is implying that their needs are clear and constant. Many people don't even know what their own needs are. That's why it takes effort to fulfill them.

We determined the success of the Internet. If we didn't need it; if it wasn't convenient for us, it would not be in every home. Just because they developed the Internet didn't mean we would automatically buy it in the name of science. They had to make it useful for us first.

AND NOW for the hard topic, will Nintendo willing to mod their software then in exchange for the monopoly of their product like most FPS and RTS developers on PCs right now or just making sequels of their products till the consumers just dried up in milking. Like COD and GH games today. And about UGC they did this since the beginning they did it on the NEs they did it on the SNES with mario paint

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hil1F2T19GY

Who will stop them to doing it now? Just remember the UGC on the NEs was only on home theres no internet at that time so theres no new meaningful content that can shared to anyone and with the internet its possible. NSMB Wii can only done once because after the initial enjoyment you cant enjoyed it forever. People needs new content and making a sequel with more levels isnt the answer. These type of games needs UGC and if Ninty needed to theyre willing to mod their games to make the game have new content.

Most traditional games today except for emmersive and story type games(SMG and other 3-d platformers are included) can have new content by modding and UGC. Thats why most modded genres are RTS and FPS.

It just makes me wonder how he can say that one type of revolution is consumer based but another type is industry based.

Every article he writes is keeping me from agreeing or disagreeing with his overall opinion on the current stats of the game industry. He says UGC is what people are not going for but there are tons of mods which at the same time, others think is not true UGC. The subject on DD not being the future of gaming, music etc. (which I whole heartedly agree) has advantages and dissadvanteges, with advatages being in the form of control by the company. as he states;

*Digital distribution is all about control. Whose control? Why, the Technocrati’s of course. Retailers will have no control over what product is put out because they are out of the loop.*
Say goodbye to FYE, GameStop, and many major retailers that sell games, movies, and music. Not to mention stores like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target will loose millions of $ in customers.

*There will be no used goods since the consumer has no control over the product. The consumer doesn’t even have control if he or she can play it at a friend’s house*

Blame digital rights management for it not wii fit. 

I am curious why retailers are going to carry game consoles, if they can't make money off game sales, and use them as loss leaders to get people into stores.