We are publishing an alternative to TTS called Tabletop Playground. It’s made in UE4, so better fidelity and performance more finely tuned, with less floaty physics. Also aims to offer a more powerful in-game editor for novices and pros alike.
We’re working on this actually at mod.io (we are also the creators of ModDB which you may be familiar with). Still early days but momentum is building and we are seeing plenty of experimentation going on. Feel free to AMA as we’ve done and continue to do a ton of research in the space
16 years ago I created a database for video game mods and led the market. Now I’m in the opposite position where services like Steam’s Workshop have taken over. Despite that my conviction that mods are critically important has never waivered, and alternatives / competition is required. So now I’m the upstart and it feels good to be building something I’m passionate about and believe in, despite the 200 ton gorilla in the room. We both serve slightly different roles, developers using our tech love what we are creating and I’m confident we can carve out a worthwhile piece of the pie.
Long story short I’m glad this is a rule I broke and didn’t let my inspiration evaporate.
It’s not as polished as the poster but I’ve open sourced our wedding website should it help serve as inspiration for you https://github.com/intenscia/Wedding
Hey i'm one of the developers of mod.io. Every part of the service is entirely optional, so if you take a look at the 0 A.D. implementation they completely bypass our authentication system and manage a users mod collection in-game themselves.
This means some features like "subscribing to auto install" don't work, but for them they want everything to occur in-game which is fine by us.
We are already doing this on our sites. We run a whitelist of ads, and when we encounter Adblock we just serve an image tag and HREF with no JS. Works well for us and the user.
DA is what inspired me to make my first website. They really pioneered strong community collaboration, long before social networking on the web became cool.
I find the valuation a little surprizing, but I guess that is what happens when you value an established business on actuals instead of potential. Good get wix.
Congratulations on the release but I can just discourage people to use URL shorteners. They obfuscate key information, are potentially a security risk as a result, require extra http requests and what happens in the future when you turn the service off? A trend I've never fancied.
Congrats on the release. We'd love to help promote and showcase it on www.indiedb.com we are community run and here to help. We also have VRDB.com In the pipeline which would be cool for this. Keep up the fine work!
Ive been running ModDB.com proudly now for 13 years and I believe the simple answer to be, some people enjoy playing others enjoy creating. Their achievements are amazing and modders have pushed gaming so far forward in the last 15+ years
Great article, I'm really enjoying the R&D going into vr at the moment and are even investing in the field myself by making VRDB.com. Despite that I believe there is going to be significant pressure from investors who are not necessarily VR enthusiasts and might not enjoy the ride as much. Let's just hope it isn't to the detriment of the future potential of VR
We run www.slidedb.com which is a developer driven website for mobile games. Whilst our site is only new so the installs we drive will be small, it is one more outlet for you to promote your game (add it here www.slidedb.com/games/add). And because all content shown (including the homepage) is posted by the community / developers - you are not hoping an editor decides to cover your game, any coverage you get is entirely dictated by the effort you put in and what you post.
We have been running simarly themed sites ModDB and IndieDB for years now reaching over 200k+ visitors daily. We hope to bring the same independent developer driven coverage to the mobile space in time.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playgroun...