Core’s Roadmap for Creators and Players

Just a few weeks ago, we hit a significant milestone with the launch of Core’s Open Alpha. We have invited creators, game makers, and world builders to start their journey in Core.

Core offers a new universe of possibilities for the next generation of player-creators to make any experience they dare to dream. Even at Open Alpha, Core is a multiplayer-ready platform with one-click publishing for anyone with or without technical or artistic skills. From the start, we have focused on balancing creators' ability to build, publish, and run games as a business with players’ desire to discover, play, and share all kinds of experiences. But this is just the beginning.

My name is Arash Nia, Chief Product Officer at Manticore Games, and I’d like to share our current feature priorities and Core’s high-level roadmap for both Creators and Players.

Creators: For the art of creating varied and engaging experiences

During our Closed Alpha, we had the privilege of working with talented and skillful creators who have enthusiastically shared their thoughts and ideas with us as they started their journey in Core. They have equipped us with a wealth of knowledge that validated the detailed list of features and priorities for the upcoming releases. In future releases, broadly, we aim to achieve a few objectives:

Monetization: Creators should have the opportunity to generate revenue and potentially earn a living. One of our main aspirations is not just to unleash creativity in gaming but also to provide a new and strong economic platform for creators. In that aim, we are building a set of monetization features and options for creators that will help them find an audience and make money based on the popularity and player engagement of their games. Monetization will have four dimensions: Player-to-creator membership: Players will be able to pay a membership to creators and receive cross-game cosmetics and/or game-specific social benefits. Player-to-creator support: A set of patronage features will allow players to earn rewards for supporting their favorite creators. Global revenue share: The amount of revenue a creator can earn will be set based on the level of player engagement with the created experience. We want to incentivize creators to develop popular and engaging experiences as defined by the player community. Tiered Creator Partnership Program: We believe in order for our creators to thrive, we will need an engaged player community. Given that philosophy, in parallel with the monetization features, we are rolling out a tiered partnership program for our creators that rewards them for player engagement. Achieving a partner status will enable the creators to monetize on Core.

Collaboration: Sharing and creating content between creators should be seamless. We’ve already seen fantastic cross-pollination among creators. We plan to build upon this foundation and support this open flow of content between creators with a slew of enhancements to Community Content and Community Games.

Deeper support for more genres: With Core, creators already have the freedom to make deep and varied experiences in any genre - though some take more creativity than others. We plan to make more features, content, and API calls that make every genre as accessible as Core makes real-time multiplayer games right now.

Enhanced persistence: In Core you can persist data for players, allowing for features like leaderboards and level progression. We will be adding more persistence features, such as allowing cross-game player data.

NPCs: In the near term, we will be introducing animated meshes that let you play animations on objects - such as making a skeleton swing its sword. This is the first step towards a fully-fledged NPC system.

From day one, we built Core in a way that creators can make high visual fidelity games and experiences. And, we are not done yet. We will continue on the same path with features such as Terrain Painting, 2D curves, Splines, and the addition of new themes for environment tilesets (e.g., Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Military to name a few).

We are covering a complex and large surface area, which means work on Core will never stop. We are constantly prioritizing between building new features versus optimizing the existing ones.

Players: For the love of discovering and enjoying any imaginable experience

On my whiteboard, at Manticore's HQ, one sentence is highlighted that drives all of our new feature discussions. "Core is the only destination for gamers." Players should play what they want, the way they want, and never need to leave Core to find or play a new or a different experience. We have already started working on a robust set of features that will make Core a destination for players.

Broadly, on the player side, we are focusing on features that will enable them to discover new games and play and share them with friends seamlessly. Playing with Friends, Core Chat, one-click join, and the ability to form groups are only a few examples of such features.

We’re also doubling down on the support for creating a network of interconnected social hangouts in Core that we call Core Worlds. As Gamespot said in a recent article, “Core does things differently by focusing more on the experience of exploring different player worlds, tying into a more extensive network that is essentially a multiverse of unique player-created landscapes."

Final words

I wanted to use this opportunity to share our excitement, thoughts, and priorities with you. The work on Core will never stop. We're covering a complex and huge surface area, which means we will be constantly balancing new features versus optimizing existing ones. We consider the road ahead as a living exercise, and priorities may change and evolve. We will keep you in the loop as we implement our plan. The feedback you provide inspires us and informs our feature development priorities. If there's something you would like to see, be sure to let us know on Discord.

Thanks! Keep creating and exploring!