Steam Workshop is not just only for mods

Many people, like me, would like to see something like sporepedia in Thrive, where players publish their creations. However, the developers of thrive clearly lack the resources and money for servers for thrivepedia that would allow it to be used for sharing creations.
However, I had an idea: many games use steam workshop not only for mods, for example ksp, space engineers, stormworks and others also use steam workshop as a platform for player creations. We already have steam workshop, why not allow fossils, saved tech objects and other player creations to be placed there?

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iirc sporepedia is a patent so we can’t implement it.

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True, but I’m not sure how in practice that would work out. If there’s like no filtering the few actual real mods (which are sadly rare enough as they are) would totally get buried and people would not be able to find them. And I’m not sure such kind of filtering is possible on to setup. Of course also allowing easy uploads like this would just allow the players to flood the workshop with low quality uploads.

Other than that slight issue I take with the amount of expected content, this is just a matter of anyone being available to do the actual feature programming. So far I think I’ve been the only one who has done any Steam integration work for Thrive.

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If ever, when should we expect this to get implemented?

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Gotta wait until 2027

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Eh, that’s not too far away, but pretty sure patents have been “reforged” to last longer a couple times…

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I hope EA doesn’t decide to extend the patent.

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If they decide to, could that signal a “Spore 2” being in the works?

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EA is far too incompetent to make a spore 2.

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Well they could make something destined for a flop, but still a “Spore 2” nevertheless.

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They appear to have no interesting in doing so

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The wording of the main patent implies that it only applies when the process is automatic, like it is in Spore. So theoretically if we had a download creatures feature but it was manual (so the player needed to browse the creatures and hit a download button) that wouldn’t infringe on the patent as it wasn’t an automated system to populate the game world with downloaded user created stuff. So we could quite easily get around the patent, or just wait until 2027 when it expires (I doubt anyone would volunteer to program this feature before then anyway).

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2027 should in theory be the year we get to macroscopic development, so it does line up well with the time by when we should have atleasted started working on a proper inter-player creation-sharing system.

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