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?
Some have already tried that. There are some games where there’s basically zero base game and the devs want the players to fill in the content. Since such games start out with nothing, no one makes mods for them, and so the games die in obscurity. Ever hear of S&box?
That said, the people behind RPGMaker have a lot of this covered. They provide a good stock of assets to let people build stuff out of the box. This lets people create content quick, which eventually brings in the people that know what they’re doing, which results in good stuff.
I remember that Microsoft “sandbox” dev environment. That went nowhere.
Simulation games lean into this. E.g. Assetto Corsa’s base content is kinda meh, but there are thousands of mods for it, and it’s still the most popular sim racing game over ten years after release (helped by deep tinkering like graphics adjustment and weather modification).
Afaik BeamNG allows creating scenarios for challenges by programming widgets in Lua.
I was thinking more like RPGMaker. Some open source engine or what not that anyone can contribute to and read the code of that supports the easy building of games. AI can help with the graphics that most people good and design aren’t good at.