If Steam decides to retire Workshop, we’d try to figure out another way. However, Steam would never retire workshop and Steam servers won’t become unreliable.
Workshop gives us an easy way for everyone to share content, download content, and moderate content.
Community Condos will have ways to decorate and customize to be unique. That’s always been our goal with them and that’s why our plans were changed since we couldn’t offer that for Plaza.
I’ll be real honest here, and this is something I personally am saying, not just because I’m a developer. Threatening to refund the game because you desire a feature is honestly not how you should convince others it’s a useful feature to you.
Please stop spamming this. This isn’t very useful.
We’ve talked about this before. Adding a tag to condos like NSFW would not be useful for the end user. We can’t expect players to properly mark their Condos and we aren’t going to sit there and join/handle reports of every single Condo that didn’t properly mark their Condos. It’s just not feasible. And if the tag can be abused, what’s the point of the tag?
There is a lot of work into adding custom model support that doesn’t rely on Steam Workshop. The entire system is hard coded for Steam Workshop download and install call backs. We’d have to make an entire system that downloads from custom URLs, stores them, then handles whenever they are updated (probably by CRC checks), then update all the UI to handle this, then update the workshop editor to export differently, handle blocking URLs, blocking players, blacklists/whitelists. Not to mention this would open the game up for binary based exploits as you’re now downloading a random file from an unsecure location (is it a .model, or is it a trojan, who knows).
It’s not really entirely something we’ve really considered fully, but maybe some day down the road we can consider it if there’s enough support for it.
Workshop content is important. By having custom URLs, you are also limiting what’s available on Workshop. Right now isn’t the proper time for that as we need to grow our Workshop content.
NSFW content could one day be a possibility in our Workshop; it’s definitely a route we can also investigate, if we so choose to. We’d also need to handle that as well and it’s another thing to consider and design.