Gamers are Eating the World

Welcome back to The Innovation Armory! Today’s piece dives deep into mod development within video games, exploring their origin, potential applications and broader applicability to software development. I interview Uri Marchand, CEO at Overwolf, the leading mod marketplace provider that recently raised $52.5 million from Insight Partners and Griffin Gaming Partners. Thank you Uri for sharing your perspective for this piece! Read on for more about:

• How more innovation in gaming stems from mods than you might think

• Mod market size and growth potential of mods

• Leveraging mods to fuel a 🔥 gaming investment strategy akin to the “Thrasio of Gaming”

• Untapped areas of innovation within the mod market

• How mods will transform video games into education vehicles

• The future of AI generated video gaming

• How mods will place creators at the center of the metaverse

• What mods tell us about the future of enterprise / consumer software development

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(MOD)ernizing Gaming

In After TikTok: The Camera of the Metaverse, I broke down a key player in the gaming creator economy focused on fans and gamer users. This part of the gaming creator economy is probably sexiest to most of my reader base because it has close parallels to other common social networking businesses and is more directly consumer-facing. However, another critical component of the creator economy in video games lurks beneath the surface: MODS. Gaming Mods are modifications to existing games done through decentralized development that alter the UI, mechanics and feel of video games to create a new version of a common game or another video game altogether. Forward thinking gaming companies like Roblox are leaning heavily into empowering users as champions of game development through decentralized gaming studio initiatives like Roblox Studio. However, traditionally captive and closed gaming studios still exist and thrive in today’s environment, but Mod development is coming to eat them alive via creator enablement marketplaces and tools like Overwolf.

If Powder is the creator economy model for the front end of gaming, Overwolf is the creator economy model for the back end of gaming by providing tools for any distributed developer to create, publish, test and monetize modifications (“mods”) to existing video games:

Mods have the potential to be incredibly lucrative for studios, creators and game developers. Relative to a captive / closed gaming systems where users are not able to develop their own modifications, mods offer numerous benefits that could translate into value creation for gaming IP holders and players alike:

• An ability to customize game play to create bespoke more tailored experiences for players based on how they would uniquely like to play their video games. This translates into higher willingness to pay and greater volume of sales as it can make games more appealing at a wide-scale without development cost being taken down solely by the studio

• Leveraging experienced user input to develop maps, new characters and more to reduce and outsource the cost of development maintenance in video games

• Modifications keep gameplay fresh to avoid cooling consumer demand and keep users engaged for longer as a trove of new content becomes available to them to integrate into their game. This elongates customer lifetime value and improves sales & marketing efficiency for studios that leverage mods as a growth vector

Microsoft has seen a tremendous financial impact from monetizing mods in its popular game Minecraft. Since launching the Minecraft marketplace in 2017, Microsoft has paid $350 million in cumulative mod fees to creators that develop decentralized add-ons for Minecraft through its proprietary mod marketplace. While it depends on the particular deal, Microsoft tends to make 50% commissions on these mods, so it has made a gross ~$700+ million as compared to its acquisition purchase price of $2.5 billion for Minecraft at a time when the game made zero dollars from mods. Minecraft has ~126M MAUs, which implies a Mod revenue / user of ~$2 if you assume $250 million of the $700 million was earned this year (Microsoft doesn’t break out by year in its financial statements but this is reasonable the given pace of growth we’re seeing). Bear in mind that a) mod monetization is only one of Microsoft’s Minecraft monetization strategies and b) this is all just from one gaming title! There are about 2.7 billion gamers in the world (not all are active), but if you assume a similar level of activity from those gamers, that gets you to a total addressable market of nearly $5.5 billion for mods on existing titles. This will grow as future titles lean more heavily on mods and develop from the ground up with modding in mind:

As discussed in After TikTok: The Camera of the Metaverse, as both a) the scope of gaming expands to other areas of life (socializing, shopping, work, etc.) and b) as more games are built from the ground up with modding in mind, I expect actual market growth to shatter this $5.5B figure. I believe the more users get to experience the tailored play of customized mods, the less they will settle for cookie cutter gaming experiences that are not tailored to their unique entertainment preferences. Some of the most popular games in the world actually originated as mods demonstrating the ability of these games to attract fanatic fanbases and the need for legacy gaming studios to embrace the power of distributed modding as a key growth vector going forward:

Fortnite, for example, originated as a Mod from the ARMA game series. Now Fortnite is one of the most popular games in the world and ARMA has been left in the dust as players flock to games at the cutting edge that leverage mods as part of their innovation strategy:

As more and more software companies try to “gamify” their interfaces and build in rewards mechanisms and workflows that draw inspiration from games (e.g. PinDuoDuo in commerce and Superhuman in email), it is clear that closely tracking trends in the gaming space is highly relevant to investing more broadly in consumer and enterprise software that could experience spillover effects from innovations that first hit gaming. Since a lot of the most innovative gaming companies seem to have gotten their origins in modding, I spoke to Uri Marchand, CEO of Overwolf, a leading modding marketplace, to learn more about the history of the space, its growth trajectory and how Overwolf is enabling mod innovation at-scale across the gaming sector. Overwolf recently raised $52.5 million in a Series C round led by Insight Partners and Griffin Gaming Partners. Please enjoy a snapshot of my conversation with Uri.

My Conversation with Uri Marchand (CEO & Founder of Overwolf)

SN: How did you personally get into gaming and how did that put you on a path to founding Overwolf?

UM: I’ve been into gaming since I was 6 when I played basically every PC game. When I graduated from my army service in Israel at 25, I started studying computer science and began to develop my first venture in e-learning. After finishing my computer science degree, I launched my second venture in Overwolf. We started the journey as creators ourselves thinking about what we were missing and wanted to create a gaming product that would add value regardless of the game you played. We started with Skype, which was the first feature we wanted to work seamlessly within games without crashing. We created an in-game overlay that would synch with popular games so gamers could communicate and collaborate with one another. That led to an evolution of the product into other bespoke features, some of which were popular but others did not get traction. We realized what was needed was a framework for building these modifications we had been trying to make to games.

SN: For those readers who aren’t familiar with mods, could you describe what a “mod” is in the context of a video game? What drove Overwolf’s eventual pivot to become a mod marketplace?

UM: Mods are modifications to existing video games. The genesis of mods started in 1983 with a mod called Castle Smurfenstein which was a mod of Castle Wolfenstein which replaced the German Nazi soldiers in the game with smurfs. Through that substitution, they created a whole new game experience for players. Back then, gamers were tech savvy and those passionate about the community wanted to play around with their favorite games and see if they could add enhancements. This creativity in wanting to make a game your own was key. Mods have come to take a front seat in much of the innovation we have seen in gaming recently. For example Fortnite originated as a mod to ARMA and League of Legends originated as a mod for Warcraft 3. You also see user generated content platforms like Roblox which you can argue are an evolution of what used to be modding. Essentially, a mod is any file that replaces some of the content in the game.

Mods have traditionally been free and marketplaces were monetizing the serving of the mods and not the mods themselves. Owners of mod marketplaces would historically pay the bill through advertising. There have been trials of having top customers / power users pay for premium mods. The successful example there is Minecraft. After the acquisition by Microsoft, the bedrock version created an integrated marketplace with their own modding solution. They work with a couple dozen creators who publish through their marketplace and customers pay to download these mods like new content. The market started with ads and has moved to a paid downloadable content (DLC) and a micro-transaction model

SN: Why don’t more game developers take better charge of their third party marketplaces for mods (like Microsoft did for Minecraft)?

UM: Producing a game is a very complicated challenge which has so many things the developers need to get right: art, technology, experience, product / market fit and scale. If it is a service, they need to keep updating the game to keep things interesting. Producing a game that a lot of people want to play is one of the hardest business challenges out there. Adding managing a developer community to that makes it extremely difficult. For most game developers, they want to focus on the fundamentals of the game and making sure users want to come back for that core piece of IP. At some point, after they’ve established product / market fit, they may consider 3-4 years down the road to add this element, but then it becomes complicated because many developers don’t build from the ground up with user-generated content in mind. Roblox is a great example of a gaming company that decided to build in this way. At Overwolf, we want to help developers manage the marketplace, curate content, monetize and pay creators: we provide all of these features as a service. If you’re a game developer that wants to build and monetize a creator community, we provide this infrastructure layer as a service 

SN: How does the economic distribution of the marketplace fees work for the various stakeholders? Do you actually pass income back to the original publishers?

UM: It definitely depends on the game developer. Many do not want to participate in the economics of the mod and are happy to have a thriving creator community around their game and are happy with us doing a traditional 70/30 split with the developer of the mod. Some developers do want to be a part of that. In those situations, the creators are entitled to 50% of the sale and we split the rest between Overwolf and the developer as the IP owner.

SN: For creators that are newer to your platform and in situations where mods are being developed for new games, what kinds of quality and control standards on the back end do you have to assess the quality of the mods?

UM: First, we have conversations with the games we support and understand what the sandbox of rules is in which they feel comfortable. Then when a creator submits a mod, we have automation tools that ensure there is no virus and that it is not malicious. We basically scan the content of the whole codebase. Once it is approved based on our automation, a human being is testing the mod and ensuring it is doing what it is supposed to do. We do have a system in place for authors that have been on our platform for years where the process is a bit more hands off. We lean more on automatic tools in this situation because we have a trust relationship with these creators. If they have millions of installs, we trust them to do a good job.

SN: For the most trusted creators you have kept over time, how do you think about developer and creator retention? What mechanisms do you have in place to keep creators happy and contributing?

UM: The class that we have defined is in-game creators: those creators developing apps and mods for games and making a living doing so. When we look at retention, it is a derivative of three things. First, significance: did what I just create make the world a better game? This could be because a lot of players downloaded and provided good feedback. Second, teamwork: some creators just are passionate about what they do and want to iterate on a feature with the community and are less financially motivated. Third, once a creator starts making a decent amount of money, we rarely see any churn. We have creators making anywhere from $5 per month (where we might see some churn) to over $100,000 per month. Once creators cross a certain threshold, it doesn’t make sense for them to quit.

SN: What are the specific ways Overwolf allows creators to monetize? What new models are you considering?

UM: We generate revenue from advertisements within our marketplace platform and advertising proceeds to creators based on their proportional share of engagement for their mods from this pool of funds. We also have a subscription available, kind of like a Spotify for mods, with a similar distribution method for each mod creator. Tipping, bespoke subscription models (for a subset of mods) and micro-transaction models are all in the pipeline. 

SN: As the scope of gaming continues to expand to other areas of life, how do you think about Overwolf’s role in leveraging its mod marketplace to help build composable virtual worlds?

UM: I recently participated in a CEO panel on the metaverse and we talked on how all of our companies interact to potentially create a future metaverse. One panelist said the metaverse would exist when I can take my identity (perhaps with some of my digital belongings) and migrate between different games and IP holders not in a single universe. That is really tough to do with the state of things today. We are still far from pragmatic applications between games. Humans have a tendency to be divided into tribes. When people organize we have a tendency over history to re-divide back into smaller groups. We have an advantage when it comes to facilitating the metaverse because we don’t develop games and so are not viewed as competitive to these virtual worlds. Through Overwolf, creators can create across games. If I wanted to create a mod, I could make it inside Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto theoretically and have a similar narrative and even have a combined server that will help me create an identity that translates across worlds and games. Neutrality is key but we first need a thick and sustainable layer of in-game creators that are creating content across games. Perhaps that could be the glue that unites across in-game experiences.

Mods as the Crux of a 🔥 Gaming Investment Strategy

Smart investors and entrepreneurs in the gaming space should track mods closely and incorporate mods actively into their investing / company building strategy. If you believe in a world where users will demand more bespoke and personalized mods for their games to maintain engagement, I see interesting strategies investors could pursue to differentiate themselves as gaming investors: Hub & Spoke, Mod Rollup, Mod Seeding.

In a Hub & Spoke strategy, gaming investors and entrepreneurs actively seek out those games that are more easily moddable and actively work with decentralized developers to involve those mods in their growth strategy so the core game developer captures a large portion of the benefit from mods. If the initial game developer structures the game in such a way such that it incentivizes more developers to build mods on its platform, it helps to better amplify the power of the initial gaming IP through a series of mod “spokes” whose virtual worlds are intimately related to the initial game that they are modifying. This creates multi-layered / three-dimensional network effects where there are powerful network effects within the core game IP (Hub 1), but these network effects also co-mingle with those in each mod spike:

So what characteristics should investors look for in order to better understand if the core game IP is moddable and to what extent it will be able to leverage mods as spokes to drive outsized growth a 3-dimensional network effects? I believe three important factors are: Composability of Source Code, Storytelling Spinoffs and Character Transferability.

In a Mod Rollup strategy, I believe there is an interesting opportunity for one holding company to acquire and purchase the IP to popular mods and then do incremental coding work to combine them and create interoperability between different modifications. This is effectively like taking the Thrasio / Branded D2C aggregator model and applying that perspective to the gaming space to realize synergies between popular gaming modifications. Smaller mod developers can sell their mods to new holding companies of game studios that further develop those mods into popular spinoff games (from strong starting points with established user bases) and develop interoperability between those games to improve the gaming experience by allowing users to more seamlessly travel between experiences in different games within the holding company studio structure. This lets a HoldCo studio effectively build a mini captive metaverse between games that closely resemble existing popular games to drive higher engagement. Similar to the Thrasio model, I believe some of these mod businesses could be acquired for lower multiples sub-scale but would trade at higher multiples when professionalized, accelerated through sales and development investment and made to be interoperable to further delight customers:

In a Mod Seeding strategy, instead of investing in / acquiring existing mods, investors could create an incubator / early stage accelerator to actively seed new mod concepts of popular games to test out new game concepts in a cost effective way. Traditionally, new game builds require a substantial amount of research & development investment and can be costly to create an minimally viable product (MVP) from scratch. Mods provide a fertile ground to test an idea for a new game within the constraints of an existing gaming framework before providing more funding to develop a new series outright as a spinout from the initial game. In this strategy, a mod effectively becomes a smarter, better type of MVP in gaming where through your mod, you can:

1. Test the critical distinctions / parameters of the game you feel you need to validate to have conviction in launching an independent title

2. All while further minimizing development requirements because you are building on an existing framework and only testing key parts of your gaming hypothesis

3. All while receiving the brand and existing fan base demand benefits of the core IP upon which you are building

4. All while seeding demand for your eventual new title within an already popular game, thereby reducing your customer acquisition costs

Monitoring the more technical base of users within a game and the mods they are building is a great way to build out a pipeline of potential pre-seed / seed gaming investment opportunities. Moreover, it is a great way for developers with aspirations to build companies to validate their ability to develop for specific audiences through the sales of their mods in marketplaces like Overwolf. Moreover, from a game developer’s perspective, smart studios should be actively monitoring this base of technical users for a wish list of innovations they may need to develop themselves / incorporate into their own games in order to retain, grow and keep their user base happy and engaged.

Additional Areas of Opportunity in Mods

While Overwolf has built a powerhouse of a business in PC modding, the industry is nascent and there is still whitespace for numerous other pockets of innovation. A couple of the areas I’ve been thinking about include:

• Device Diversity - Overwolf is focused on PC mods and there is potentially an interesting opportunity to help developers monetize on other devices, particularly on new AR and VR devices that emerge like Snap Spectacles, as gaming will clearly be a core initial use case of those devices

• Streamer & Esports Collaboration - I think there is an interesting opportunity for developers to collaborate directly with streamers and esports organizations to help develop mods that increase user engagement in streams on Twitch and in eSports competitions. These mods can help to more directly incorporate user input into game instances used for purposes of professionalized eSports to drive a higher willingness to pay and more streams for professional events

• Non-Gamer Creator Collaborations - Uri’s anecdote about the industry originating from the Castle Wolfenstein mod into Castle Smurfenstein got me thinking: what if character mods did not merely eliminate a negative character (like a nazi soldier) while replacing them with a funny character, but eliminated a neutral character and replaced them with a highly popular creator who could be paid a fee to license IP for their character to the game? What if there was a Castle Comic-Stein where you clapped your way through a comedy castle, clapping at comedian creators like Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock as they try to test out standup bits on you? I think these types of non-gamer creator collaborations could have the potential to widen the diversity of audience that a core game IP appeals to in a pretty material way:

As more entertainment activities converge with gaming, these sorts of collaborations with developers will become increasingly important for creators to reach audience members that retreat further and further into gaming virtual worlds for more of their entertainment and daily life.

• Other Non-Gaming Applications in Mods - Speaking of the expansion of other aspects of our lives into gaming: as this activity creep extends to education, work, etc., it is impractical to expect the core developers of the gaming IP to invest exclusively their own capital to expand their virtual world into all of these non-entertainment related activities and to do so in a manner that is personalized to the gamer. I think it is likely that the core entertainment activities will largely be handled by the primary game developer, but that non-entertainment use cases are handled by a distributed group of mod developers. One non-gaming application that I believe will be handled via mods and possibly in partnership with other software providers is layering in education content directly into popular game play. A host of new platforms have already popped up offering this short form video content in partnership with traditional school curriculum. Emile and Litnerd are accredited to work with high school educational institutions to tie short form video and creator content into classes to improve student engagement. As more Gen Alpha and Gen Z activities are conducted in gaming over time, it is only logical these educational integrations also expand into gaming:

I know what you’re thinking. Do we really want to empower children to be able to use video games as an excuse for studying?

In all seriousness, educational mods are of course better suited for certain types of video games. Call of Duty probably doesn’t present a great opportunity for educational mods. However, there are many ways video games could be used for teaching and Microsoft has been very forward thinking with Minecraft in building these methodologies into the game. Here are just a couple of examples of how gaming can be used for educational initiatives:

1. Create immersive worlds that teach students about a particular culture or ethnic group to improve diversity

2. Generate space-based virtual worlds to teach astronomy including constellations, planets, stars, etc.

3. Create a series of simulated nature environments to teach students about evolution and natural sciences in an immersive way

4. Leverage virtual building blocks to teach basic mathematical principles around geometry and architecture

5. Generate in-game tasks to enhance student leadership and collaboration

The opportunities are endless and Minecraft has already been used by teachers to address the first pillar around teaching about certain ethnic groups, like this modification that was used to teach New Zealand students about indigenous Māori culture:

Because education is not the core competency of these gaming studios, it makes sense for non-entertainment mods in other virtual worlds to be done by a distributed base of mod developers. 

AI-Generated Video Games

Research labs and game studios have been able to create basic games actually generated by artificial intelligence algorithms that are trained on popular games and by analyzing some of their key characteristics to design new video games. For example, at Georgia Tech, researchers created two new games “Killer Bounce” and “Death Walls” after analyzing footage from games like Super Mario and Mega Man. There are broader copyright protection issues that need to be sorted through before this sort of development becomes mainstream. If you leverage other discrete games as training inputs to your AI, do you owe a royalty to those gaming providers? How different do they need to be to not owe this type of royalty? These issues are not unique to gaming: composable NFTs and other digital objects that draw inspiration from existing digital assets will be susceptible to the same legal objections.

However, while these games are relatively simple in their current forms, I believe that over the long-term the standard gaming model will change dramatically to leverage AI-generated games as starting points for game IP in tandem with mods to tailor content at the individual level. Mods are popular with users because of their ability to create more customized game play that is tailored to a unique gamer’s experience. There is actually a fair amount of upfront investment that game studios make into launching games that sometimes may be reversed or unnecessary based on the mod of choice / desired gaming end state by a particular group of gamers. In order to reduce unnecessary upfront investment of games, but still allow for richness and customizability of game play, it makes a lot of sense to use AI at scale to generate the core software IP that underides a game title and then give players / local developers the tools to easily customize their own gaming experience by creating “no code” mods on the primary title. This allows studios to shift unnecessary upfront developer costs onto players who want the features most and provides users the flexibility to create their optimal gaming experience. The AI can also track mods that are created by generating a centralized repository of modifications and then use that database to train on for subsequent releases of the core IP so each subsequent release is better equipped to accommodate mod communities. Below is an example of how this could work for a theoretical racing game:

The complexity with this model is that while it is well-suited for individual game play, it becomes technically difficult to coordinate multiplayer experiences with a consistent UI. I envision two ways to get around this: First, there are certain modifications where the inputs on the individual player end can be different but the end state of what is displayed to each player can be the same. For example, in Mod 3 above, the feel of the road / rumble of the controller may feel different to each player, but the output of the impact on the race is the same for both. Second, and more saliently, I foresee a system where smart AI gaming studios license their IP via franchisee / sub-license agreements to specific mod developer communities who each develop / collaborate and vote amongst one another through decentralized governance on the gaming norms of their community’s instance of the IP.

Mods as Metaverse Enablers

Uri’s idea that mods could be the “glue” that connects virtual worlds in the metaverse was really fascinating to me. Mods could be a really organic avenue to helping enable the interoperable metaverse vs. other paths I’ve explored:

1. Catalyst to Go Open Source - To create interoperability between virtual worlds, studios need a compelling individual incentive to build bridges to other studios. While there is a meaningful opportunity to create a larger addressable market for all companies in a cooperative world of interoperability, larger studios that already have highly engaged fanbases have less of a private incentive to do so because the risk / reward of losing engagement for their core IP may not be worth it. As an intermediate step, the opportunity to make a lot of money as a publisher earning commissions from mods is a strong incentive for these studios to create open source development infrastructure. Remember how lucrative this has been for Microsoft! These open source rails could help better lay the framework for future bridges built between virtual worlds in subsequent development stages.

2. Placing the Creator at the Center - Mods that could cut across games would place the creator at the center of the metaverse, with in-game creators as the architects that form relevant virtual bridges between worlds. This is preferable to interoperability development coming from the top down because a) creators are closer to what actual end users want and b) a global pool of in-game creators represents a more diverse set of perspectives and would help bring about a more inclusive metaverse through melding of personnel preferences through group consensus. Lastly, I personally believe that if controlled by a handful of parties, a partially captive metaverse could be abused in a plethora of ways and so distributing development power across more parties is better from a governance perspective.

3. Grassroots Change - Just as mods have been used throughout the history of gaming to create numerous spinoffs of popular games, they could be used to create spinoffs that have a set of consensus parameters that make more robust metaverse development easier in the future. For example, these changes could consist of a common set of identity, natural law, payment and virtual map parameters. This common set of parameters could be pushed by popular modsters to create grassroots consensus around features key to enable future interoperability. Moreover, in the same way that Uber was technically illegal in many cities under existing taxi license laws but eventually was permitted by winning over consumer sentiment, I believe a similar grassroots “winning of hearts and minds” will occur related to bringing about the metaverse. Some publishers may object to the way their software is being used by modsters in regards to interoperability, but the experience will be so much better for the average gamer that the publisher will be forced to eventually accept the new reality: grassroots mods created that stitch together an open metaverse.

Actually creating these bridges between virtual worlds will of course require more direct collaboration with game studios, but my point is that mods can lay the building blocks for easing this interoperability. Below is an illustrative example of identity portability in the metaverse:

I think it is particularly interesting to think about how these rails could help catalyze an open metaverse in conjunction with Overwolf’s subscription offering by incentivizing cross-pollination of mods between virtual worlds through subscription bundles that cut across gaming titles.

Mods are a Model for Distributed Software Development in Enterprise & Consumer

The gaming mod framework is a useful way to think about the future of broader software development efforts. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, famously said “Every company is now a software company.” Throughout the pandemic, we have seen unprecedented hiring of software developers across sectors contributing to rising developer wages and developer shortages. More developers are now joining historically offline corporations in the midst of a digital transition that may be hiring their first in-house developers vs. purely using third party software.

As more traditional and legacy sectors look to create their own software and develop proprietary software tools to drive their own competitive differentiation, a hub and spoke model of translating core software IP through local mods makes a lot of sense. This model is already effectively taking shape in the form of both:

1. To a lesser extent, APIs that serve as the building blocks for companies to incorporate into their own proprietary codebases (this is more of an intermediary step between captive software and software mods)

2. Open source software whereby companies have the right to use, change, modify and distribute the underlying open source software

The concentration of innovation tied to mods and rapid acceleration of mod adoption is happening faster in gaming than is the transition to open source software in traditional software development. However, as mod development eats more of the total pie in gaming, I also expect open source software and composable, blockchain protocol-based software to eat more of the overall pie in software development. Just as we see marketplaces for mods emerge in gaming, I expect to see:

• More monetization by users / modifiers of open source enterprise software to other third party clients of their own

• A greater set of developer productivity tools to emerge to allow easier customization and tailoring of software to an organization’s bespoke needs

• Offloading of software code maintenance demands onto a distributed client base that is empowered by developer tools in order to reduce costs of the core IP developer

For each type of common gaming “mod” category that exists today, it is easy to envision similar use cases applying that same framework to the broader software development world:

While open source development has become more popular, as more corporations add their own coders to their organizations, they will want to own the competitive advantage created by their in-house coders. Just as modding has become table stakes in gaming to retain and attract users, developing non-gaming software in this manner will be critical to prevent captive software vendors from being left in the dust.

Is software eating the world or are gamers eating the world? I bet you didn’t know the cookie monster was team Xbox:

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