You may not think that modders should make money for their work, but at least one developer does.
Keen Software, the indie studio responsible for the Minecraft-in-zero-gravity-like Space Engineers, has introduced a $100,000 fund to support people who want to build modifications for the game. Space Engineers is an Early Access release on the Steam digital-distribution store, but despite its unfinished state, its community has already built more than 3,000 mods and 100,000 items for it. This makes it one of the top-five releases in terms of available add-ons in the Steam Workshop, which is a centralized hub for player-created mods and items. Providing a developer-backed fund for modders represents a different take on reimbursing the community for its work. This comes just a few weeks after Valve, which owns and operates Steam, tried to introduce a way for gamers to pay for mods in publisher Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim role-playing game. That initiative crashed and burned spectacularly, and Valve backtracked on its plan.
Keen says it will give the money to people who build total-conversion mods. These are modifications that drastically change aspects about a game. For example, someone could use a total-conversion mod to theme the entirety of Space Engineers on an existing property like Star Trek.
We’ve reached out to Keen to ask if it has thought out how paying modders will work with copyrights. Most corporations don’t go after mods that use brands since they are free downloads, but if Keen ends up giving them money, it could invite litigation.
To better enable the community to accomplish this, Keen is giving its fans complete access to the Space Engineers source code. This will empower fan developers to make bigger and better mods.
“We’ve been working for months to find a way to give our community a bigger role in Space Engineers development,” Keen founder and chief executive Marek Rosa said in a statement. “We finally decided that the best way was to give them 100 percent access to the game’s source code. We are also aware of the risks that this decision has but our team is prepared to face any challenge that may appear. We are very concentrated on the game’s development, and I assure you that we will continue at the same pace as we have done for 2 years and deliver a game that everyone will love playing.”
Those risks include enabling nefarious developers to easily copy and steal Keen’s work. But the studio is obviously expecting that moves like this will endear it to its fans while also giving it a major advantage in terms of mod support.
You can find the Space Engineers source code live on GitHub right now.