I started out as a modder, I ran a huge custom modded server for NWN, made random gen dungeons for Warcraft III and did a total conversion for Fallout 3. The fallout mod got me a C&D from gamesworkshop, which pretty quickly turned me right off their entire organisation. Whats the point of sinking hundreds of hours into something that'll just get you sued? Whats the point of suing fans for spreading your content? Its all just madness.  Soon after that I stopped making mods and started volunteering for open source games instead. I recently did a modpack for minecraft, but it broke in the latest update, because they slightly altered their texture format, and I'll be stuffed if I'm going through and fixing thousands of textures.

Its typically much much harder to contribute to open source games than to mod-friendly closed source games. Firstly the devs want you to learn git and play their pushmepullyou craziness. Secondly the content pipelines are often incredibly fiddly, often requireing scripting knowledge just to get the simplest asset in game. And finally, its exceedingly rare for an open source game to have a world editor/mission editor, which means the barrier for entry is much much higher than for many closed source games.

If an open dev wants to attract modders, they should be making the barrier for entry as low as humanly possible. In minecraft you can edit your skin in paint and upload it directly through the website, and it shows up in game. A three year old could do that. Similarly, the most modded games like Warcraft III and the Elder Scrolls, have really simple but powerful editing tools,  if we didn't have those tools, Tower Defense and DOTA might never have been invented. To my knowledge, no open source game has a level editor that is anywhere near that level. The closest we come are things like the Cube editor projects, like octaforge, which are pretty fun, but even then, they don't have visual scripting interfaces, so you literally have to be a scripter or programmer to add any interactivity at all.

The vast majority of modders have absolutely no idea what they are doing, and only started making mods because it was easy. Look at Little Big Planet, which has millions upon millions of mods made by toddlers, sure there is a sea of crappy ones, but there are also thousands of amazing mods, by sheer virture of odds and scale.

Making your game easy to mod isn't just about creating complex tools, it can be as simple as having your game check the texture directory for new textures at start up, rather than loading them from some obscure locked and repackaged library.  The ammount of times I've been told I need to recompile the entire game just to change a texture... that is an instant turn off.

These were all made in Mandelbulber and Gimp on Linux Mint, so totally using open source software from the ground up. The only downside to producing these in a an open stack is that it can't export to a mesh or voxel cloud, otherwise I'd be further editing them in Meshlab and uploading the meshes.  I've been experimenting with writing python scripts to generate the fractals directly in Blender, but for the most part they take a lot longer to process. 

We already run it as a combination of the two. Collections are user currated content, and from time to time submissions are rejected (usually because of licencing issues or if the submission contains no actual content). Its actually really hard to make something with *no* value, even sketches can be remixed and reused in new ways for other art works. 

I think the Sara art challenge is a great example of works being remixed over and over until they become game quality art, maybe none of the submissions are fully ready for any given game or engine, but they are incrementally getting there, and giving the artists experience and feedback in the process.

I'd agree with clint; every game has different needs, both in terms of art style and technical requirements, even if we set a minimum bar, it'd still be a lot lower than many devs would like, simply because we will let through content which isn't right *for them*. 

If we were solely focused on getting open art to developers, then this site wouild be just reposts of content from existing open source games. However this site isn't primarily about specific game devs or existing work, its about finding new game art, new game artists and growing the general open gaming community. 

If you want loads of off the shelf art, just remix it from an existing FOSS game, if you want to foster and encourage new game artists, then we need OGA to stay how it is.

Finally, I do not want it to seem that we are all dismissing your feedback, you do raise a valid concern, and we have been working to try and address it. Collections is a relatively new feature, and there are more such features in the pipeline, but the site is mainly developed by one guy, who happens to be incredibly busy.

Firstly I dismiss the concept that there are works which aren't remixes, no man is an island.

Secondly I'd agree with Julius,  the *average* quality is a poor indication, remixing existing art assets is easier than just remixing ideas and styles. On average there is less effort put in, so one would think on average the quality could be considered lower. I wonder what would happen if you factored in the time spent on a work? I'd imagine remixes would win on a time basis, since with a given hour of work, a given individual will be able to produce more work if they can remix existing works as their basis.

Finally, the community used as a basis for their study is very skewed towards remixes being of a low quality. I would suggest that if the authors did their study on OGA, they'd find remixes almost always improving upon the original in some way.  If you set your community up to allow people to spam low effort remixes, you'll see a lot of cruft, whereas if you encourage people to incrementally improve upon works, you'll find the quality steadily rising with each remix.