Developing Trends in "User-Generated"

From RPS: Valve (Half-Life, Half-life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2) has hired the reclusive IceFrog, who's been developing Defense of the Ancients: Allstars (a Warcraft 3 mod that has been far more popular than Warcraft 3 for several years now, that pits two teams of any five of ninety-five (!) unique heroes in a rpg/strategy beatdown) since version 6.01. His official word on the subject sounds appropriately excited and NDA-d, revealing he's been given his own dev team, and that this is great news for DotA fans.

This comes hot on, if not the heels, then the trail of Blizzcon, when Blizzard announced Starcraft 2's being designed to gleefully co-opt the creative impulses of Blizzard fans. You'll doubtless remember my reaction to that news, which I characterized as being a direct response to the success of DotA: Allstars, and Valve's distribution/community software, Steam. To say nothing of Valve's propensity to cherry-pick the best of the amateur game developer world, now re-demonstrated.  This all leaves

I expect an arms race; good, extensible games gather a community of players interested in extending the game, and the larger the pool of practitioners gets, the better the top 1% of them get. And the more companies buy into that strategy, the more competetive and flexible they'll become in their offers, until they've thinned themselves into branded portals, and the possibility space is seeded with a thousand thousand budding developers, inventing three genres a year.

I try to distrust axioms, but how strong the siren song calls from "more games is always better!"  The only dark cloud is that Steam and similar distribution platforms will give the established players a big advantage.  Steve Feak, the creator of Allstars, bravely founded Riot Games, due to release the openly-DotA-inspired League of Legends: Clash of the Fates Real Soon Now, but funding, developing, promoting, selling, distributing and supporting your own game is a steeplechase many developers won't bother trying to run.  And even if they were able to, on the internet as in physical retail, buying something from an self-owned shop demands more of the customer than the one-stop big-box store.  I mean, there's mp3s till hell won't hold them all around the internet, but rather than search for and become familiar with the stockrooms and storefronts of a dozen different sites, gaining a greater selection, and perhaps even saving some web-dollars, most people are satisfied to learn the iTunes interface once.