when worlds collide

It’s been mildly irksome to me that developers don’t cooperative with each other as much as they could. It’s a process I’m sure wouldn’t just be advantageous for the collaborators creatively, but perhaps commercially too. CCP especially could benefit from some kind of binary-shop conjugation. I’m not suggesting they should join forces with Valve and create some kind of EVE / Portal hybrid – intriguing though the possibility might be, all I am suggesting is that where there’s obvious synergy between two games, why not re-create one in the image of the other for the benefit of the communities of both (hopefully initiating some cross-pollination into the process)? Publishers do it all the time, only when they want to cash-in on the work of a star studio, they invariably press-gang one of their lesser able teams into the role and results are usually not good.

Reading up on and playing Sins of a Solar Empire has inspired this train of thought; a space game which I still haven’t fully explored and one of obvious depth and beauty. By an absolute stroke of luck Sins also happens to be highly modifiable. With this in mind my question goes thus: Why, when there is so much potential to get something so right, don’t games studios mod something between themselves rather than leave it to chance, or have some mod team attempt the task and lose interest half-way through? CCP are probably never going to attempt a 4X game and Ironclad won’t be all that keen to embark on making a space MMO, so why not do the best for fans of both games and get together to mod Sins of New Eden together? More EVE players would play Sins, more Sinners would try EVE, and if you have both, you get the mod – professionally constructed – for free! Yeah, I know, it’ll never happen. Oh well, I can dream can’t I?