The Houston Chronicle ran a story recently about how major video game companies are allowing independent and amateur developers to create games. Being an avid Counter-Strike player back in my heyday, I’m very familiar with the fruits of fan customization and modification of games (like custom maps, player models & skins, and the like) but such customizations were usually the works of teams, and found exclusively on the PC gaming platform.

Consoles have traditionally been a completely different story, with efforts to open the platform to amateur developers being borderline illegal. The three console giants, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have now opened up digital distribution channels to their consoles. This is great news: after all, who knows what gamers want better than the gamers themselves? The openness empowers both gamers and amateur developers alike to get their feet in the door and generate new content.

This is a very sensible move by the video game companies; they greatly expand the developer talent base while incurring very little cost of their own. What’s more, often larger scale teams come together to collaborate on the development of more ambitious projects. With a larger collaborative community of game developers, the potential for creativity and quality games is sky high. This is also a way for video game companies to keep an eye out for up-and-coming talent.

Creating a game is by no means an easy task, but this shift makes things easier. It may take a while for this to catch on, but with ever-increasing technological advances and having the internet as a tool for cheap and effective distribution, I foresee a great influx of user-developed games within the next few years.