Sony Online Entertainment revealed today that it is rolling out its own answer to Valve’s Steam Workshop, intended to allow its more entrepreneurial players to create custom items for its in-game marketplaces. Games including EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Vanguard and –at a later date– PlanetSide 2 will be opened up to player submissions. And like Steam Workshop, players will see a cut of the profits as well. Reports Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Nathan Grayson:
[Items] that make the cut will get 40 percent of profits from their creation’s sales. That’s definitely better than Valve’s 25 percent from TF2 Workshop submissions, but – at least, on paper – not as hefty as the 85 percent chunk of change Diablo players get from real money sales. Granted, Diablo’s system works on a case-by-case basis, so it’s not an entirely equal comparison.
As Grayson goes on to note, the one key element Player Studio lacks is a community voting system, which seems like a deliberate regression. It remains to be seen how this will affect Player Studio’s success, if at all. Says Grayson: “The world of user-created content is murky. It’s uncharted territory, so we haven’t paved over it with concrete rules just yet. We’ll see, I suppose.”
Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
