After two years under a free-to-play model, Microsoft Studios and Team Dakota have elected to switch their model for Project Spark to a completely open creation system. Project Spark has been a bastion of creativity on the Xbox One and Windows 8.1 (and up) but was stymied by paywalls that restricted the full use of much of the content that the game offered.
In the next update those paywalls will be gone and a greater variety of content will likely stream through, but it looks like the elimination of those paywalls will halt production of content from Team Dakota. Conker’s Big Reunion’s episodic style content releases will be ended. The dev team is hoping fans will step up and complete the story without their help.
“Microsoft will pivot from producing DLC and active feature development to encouraging more user generated content and opening the Project Spark experience.” – Project Spark official
While the big news of the update is the free content coming to players, there are also new assets included as well with 46 packs totaling 2000+ individual assets.
Project Spark is an open-world sandbox game with a heavy focus on user creation and content sharing. Games can vary from something extremely simple like tic-tac-toe to something incredibly complex like full-featured first-person shooters, RPGs, and other games.
The update will be rolling out October 5 to current owners.