The GTR2 Mod Bounty Program

Update 2022-10-07: This was a long-abandoned idea I had to crowd-source GTR2 mods but after feedback and thinking it over it doesn't really feel compatible with the spirit of modding.

The GTR2 Mod Bounty Program

The GTR2 Mod Bounty Program is fan crowd-sourcing to improve our favourite game, GTR2.

The idea is to pledge money, any amount of your choice, towards one or more bounties, and then match bounties with interested modders who are willing to implement the requested features.

In return for successfully implementing the mod, modders will be rewarded with the bounty amount.

You can review the details including currently available bounties here:

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If you have comments or suggestions for improvement, please reply, I'd love to hear what people think.

If you're an interested fan or modder, please contact me!

Why a bounty program?

I've been thinking about crowd-sourcing sim improvements for some time. It's not tied to GTR2, it could be applied to any sim being developed. It just so happens I'm starting the concept with GTR2 because I feel it's a great platform that could still see much improvement.

There has long been a real-world problem with the way sims are developed: Their content is either completely open or completely closed. We all see what happens with the approach of iRacing, a wall-garden and expensive, RaceRoom, no modding, Reiza, completely open but having a hard go, and rFactor, open but moving to a more paid/closed approach.

Open sims are great for users, who get all the benefits of modders efforts, but developers can't control their revenue streams when the content is out of their control.

Closed sims are great for developers, who can now control their content and charge for updates, but bad for users who can't change anything about the sim and don't get the benefits that modders bring to the table.

A bounty program attempts a win-win solution between these two approaches: Keep the content open, a win for users and modders, and provide a mechanism for developers to claim bounties for new or improved content, a win that allows them to control their revenue streams.

A further improvement, from a developer's point of view, would be a bounty program that kept content encapsulated in DRM for a limited time, protecting their revenue stream, and at a later time would be opened up for end-users, which would give their userbase all the benefits of modder involvement.

I hope this bounty program takes off but I also hope it starts a discussion and gives developers some ideas about how they could approach sims differently, protecting their interests but also gaining amazingly devoted fans along the way.

(This has been cross-posted on racedepartment.com, nogripracing.com, and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])

While a great Idea, i dont think there is much that can be done internally like that for GTR2. That would require the source code like Reiza did from ISI which probably none of us here could get/do.

Sylphide wrote:While a great Idea, i dont think there is much that can be done internally like that for GTR2. That would require the source code like Reiza did from ISI which probably none of us here could get/do.

You might very well be right but seeing what the XD mod did with visuals and data I think it must be possible to do some really great, advanced things, at least for the current bounties I've listed so far.

Quite interested in this, potentially. Particularly when it comes to cars.

For example, people have brought over cars from ToCA RD3, but no one seems to have ever brought the two Corvette's across, even though they are completely different from the SimBin car.

I've often toyed with the idea of contacting the relevant people, and offering a 'bounty' for bringing over the cars I'd like to see in GTR2. Obviously, that's a little different than asking for cars whose models are in games that haven't been cracked, or just don't exist in games.

Is that something that could happen with this project? Would such practice be acceptable at all?

When money is involved, you have to be more careful about what you're paying for. Paying for reverse engineering other games' content would be problematic from an IP perspective.