User Generated Content (UGC) is a key route to commercial game monetization.
Gaming is a serious business. Over and above the fact that the video games industry is worth billions of dollars every year and so clearly ranks as a business entity in its own right, the use of video games is said to improve cognitive skills, bolster hand-eye coordination and fuel a user’s personal gamification charge - which is a sort of undefinable measure of an individual’s desire to succeed and overcome obstacles in real life (IRL).
Gaming is also an increasingly user-customizable business. Gamers were first offered game build adaptability options back in the 1980s in pinball, motorbike and Mario platform games. These rudimentary so-called ‘level editors’ enabled non-programmers to change basic structures inside games and create what we now call User Generated Content.
The era of User Generated Content
Now far advanced from its early beginnings, User Generated Content (or now, UGC for short) has become a paradigm in and of itself. As the game software application developers at Microsoft’s Azure PlayFab division point out, “User Generated Content brings communities together to turn games like Minecraft, Flight Simulator and Roblox into ever-evolving, thriving platforms. By providing game developers with a robust set of tools to create open environments for players, they can more deeply increase engagement while better empowering individual creators to share and monetize their work.”
That monetization is important, gaming is now a serious, customizable, monetizatable business.
Onward to Microsoft Azure PlayFab UGC then. This is a foundational framework technology (currently in public preview) that exists behind the marketplaces for Minecraft and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It enables those games to host and facilitate working UGC systems (where creators can host and sell their content, players can browse and search for items to purchase etc).
Implementing these frameworks in a game from scratch can be time-consuming and developer-resource intensive, but they’re hugely important for driving and fostering ongoing community engagement. As the UGC economy starts to grow, companies like Microsoft with its Azure PlayFab cloud platform want to foster this type of activity as it brings more gamers, content makers and associated parties to the table.
Micosoft’s open economic theory
This all means that Microsoft is also enabling even non-Microsoft games software developers to use Azure PlayFab UGC - the business logic being the same as Microsoft saying it loves Linux i.e. if you insist on building and programming for non-Microsoft platform technologies, then Redmond is fine with that, if you use Microsoft platform technologies to do it.
As Microsoft itself says, “The preview of these powerful UGC tools further our goal to make Azure is the most open and extensible cloud for game development. Whether it’s for Xbox, PC, or another platform, we’re providing the tools to grow.”
Going back to basics for a moment, Microsoft Azure if obviously the company’s cloud services platform and Microsoft Azure Playfab is the games backend part of the cloud used for building games and running managed game services such as real-time analytics and so-called LiveOps (the live backend data services operations requirements needed to ensure we can all zap aliens, zombies and baddies when we need to) foundations.
Logically, coming full circle then Microsoft Azure PlayFab UGC is that part of the gaming cloud services platform that aims to foster player engagement and build out new (sometimes monetizable) layers like this one focused on User Generated Content.
The concept here hinges on the suggestion that where software games developers make the effort to cultivating a creator community, they can build a virtuous cycle of engagement. Microsoft suggests that as a community creates content, players discover and enjoy, those players may become inspired to create their own content… and the cycle repeats. This is a large part of the rationale and perhaps validation behind why Redmond has worked to created a service like Azure PlayFab UGC in the first place.
What does user content look like?
Microsoft says that the world of UGC is a broad church and that the term itself can embody many different things. “User Generated Content (UGC) is a wide term that encompasses many aspects of our online lives - a tweet, a photo and a video are all examples of UGC. In the world of gaming, this tends to be synonymous with mods [modifications], texture packs, character skins, even new styles of gameplay,” writes the Azure PlayFab team, in a blog.
In more commercially developed terms, five of the most active vendors in this space have racked up more than US$1 million in UGC revenue since the August 2020 launch of the new-generation version of Microsoft Flight Simulator for Xbox. They have done this mainly by creating and selling game modifications and add-ons for the game, which include everything from updated maps to new planes, missions etc.
As of April this year, Minecraft marketplace creators have generated more than $350 million selling modificationss, add-ons and other so-called game ‘experiences’. Players have downloaded 1 billion unique pieces of content directly from the Minecraft Marketplace. In order to make this happen at a software engineering level, both Minecraft and Microsoft Flight Simulator added custom monetization layers to the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and tools featured in Azure PlayFab UGC toolset.
The coding team at Azure PlayFab say that its easy-to-integrate APIs allow players to upload their own creations and share them with the community. There are also search APIs incorporated into the system (a Google Maps for content treat navigation if you will) to enable players to quickly discover relevant content. There are also moderation tools (both on the developer and player sides) built-in to help ensure the content is safe and appropriate for the community.
The rise of the UGC economy
It’s certainly true that software engineers thrive on community engagement, gamers thrive on extras, bonuses and so-called Easter Eggs (the hidden game features usually only found by hard-core enthusiasts and game completionists) and all of us are thriving on interconnectivity in era when some of it has been hard to experience in the way that we always used to.
While a lot of game content advice, tips, guides and walkthroughs are out there for free, in the professional commercial world of games software application development and its associated communities there is still no such thing as a free lunch… and 99% of sites with game guide content with have advertising on them.
As the UGC economy grows, the games industry gets more fun, more competitive, more gamified and yet more serious all at the same time. It’s time to level-up.
User Generated Content (UGC) is a key route to commercial game monetization.
