Yes, this is another rant about the slow pace at which updates are released. Kinda.

Sorry.

Anyway, I'm sure many if not most here are more or less familiar with Valve, the game studio behind games like Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, DotA 2 and CS:GO. Most of you will also know Steam, their digital distribution platform. One of Steam's features, the Steam Workshop, is something I'd like to discuss here.

For those who don't know, the Steam Workshop allows users to create and share content, usually mods, for many of the games available on Steam. This content can usually be downloaded to alter gameplay. However, for a few games, the Workshop works a bit differently. Instead of downloading it, users get to vote on which content they would like to see officially included into their game. This has until recently been restricted to Valve's own games, however, it has recently been made available to all game studios.

The implications of this are massive. It means that the game developers can focus solely on picking and balancing the content to put into their game, whilst the community does a huge portion of the work. The developers have their work done for them for free, the workshop creators get a share of the profit their content generates (in the case of skins) aswell as getting some acknowledgement for the work they have done, usually in the form of an item or a badge displayed in-game or on their profile, and the community gets much more frequent updates. Everybody wins!

I am convinced that allowing for user generated content in SK - possibly but not necessarily through the Steam Workshop - would greatly improve the game and help it not only regain but surpass its former glory. I must admit, this (at least to me) seems so obvious that I feel like the developers must have already considered it and probably have their reasons to not want to include it, but who knows, if enough people show support for the idea, maybe OOO will change their mind.