@nateandrews:Thanks
@gundato: I thought the actual secret to the mod era is that there were thousands of them, and even tho the ratio of ones that stay in obscurity to the ones that get popular stay the same, but the specific numbers of each go up. The only reason dev curated maps / modes hold popularity is because when there's only one option for what to play it's impossible for the playerbase to get split up.
Plus I think it's a little harsh to say there wasn't even "basic" curation. There's tags for what kind of creation it is, search, bookmark levels, bookmark creators, and a dev curated showcase that I saw swap out more than once in the time that I was checking in on a fairly regular basis. I'm pretty sure that that's already more than Mario Maker had in the way of curation. Plus There was at least 3 content drops that increased the toolkit of pieces that creators had to work with, so there was post-release support from the devs.
As far as being a separate binary...at least you didn't have to dig through folders to launch it, it was there from the main menu. But can't deny how rough it was that it took a separate load that was probably longer than the initial boot, and without even having a some kind of showcase preview before that load to convince anyone why that load is worthwhile. Plus the multiplayer was the same way, and to @humanity's point, I think people got caught up with the disparity between the campaign and the MP that SNAPMAP wasn't even a consideration. I had fun jumping into the MP for a little while because it was somewhere on the level of a q3 or later arena shooter, and really in I think people found it a letdown because even though it was /fine/, it didn't surprise or advance anything about the genre the way the campaign did, and it stood out.
There was probably also the problem that people weren't ready to thinking about coming to Doom for a content creation toolkit. You might think differently with the long (and still active) history of community Doom WADs, but maybe 2016 was far enough removed that people were looking to compare it in terms of modernization - compare it to Halo and CoD rather than it's own history. @thievingsince95 brings up that stand alone Halo Forge, which I was super pumped about when it was first announced, but even I constantly forget that it exists. There was a lot of good content created for Forge, but it was really being tied to a package that got people into it. But that initial load for SNAPMAP (plus all the character customization unlocks were completely disconnected from the ones in MP) really made it feel like something with a high initial investment, vs Forge that IIRC was just a tab over that you could even kind of wind up in accidentally.
Dreams could go LBP, but both of those will reach a higher standard because you go into a Media Molecule game knowing it's about browsing and creating community content. The first comparison I think of is Trials Evolution. That was a side-scrolling platform racer that had tools powerful enough to let people turn it into first person jumpscare houses, but then we got a few interesting things and then a sharp falloff, maybe because those weren't side-scrolling platform races.
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