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UGC Distribution Executive Summary

Recommendation

AeroBeat should use a hybrid UGC model for the near-term PC community release:

  • keep the package contract, validation rules, cloud bake/sign pipeline, and runtime trust boundary first-party
  • use mod.io as the current outer UGC shell for community-facing discovery, subscriptions, ratings, reporting, and file delivery
  • keep all core content identity and trust decisions vendor-neutral and AeroBeat-controlled

Why this is the right near-term choice

mod.io is the current outer-shell choice because it reduces v1 surface area

For a camera-first Boxing + Flow game shipping PC community-first, the fastest way to support creators is not to build every community feature from scratch.

A mature third-party shell can help with:

  • creator pages and community identity
  • browsing and discovery
  • subscriptions/follows
  • ratings, comments, and reports
  • hosted downloads and CDN distribution
  • moderation dashboards and admin ergonomics

That lets AeroBeat spend engineering time on the parts that are uniquely AeroBeat: package design, trust, safety, and runtime behavior.

Fully self-hosting everything is expensive earlier than it needs to be

A full first-party UGC platform would also require AeroBeat to own:

  • account systems and support flows
  • abuse prevention and rate limits
  • search and discovery UX
  • moderation tooling and takedown workflows
  • storage, CDN, quotas, and operational support
  • community admin surfaces and legal/process overhead

That is real product and ops scope. It may become worth it later, but it is larger than the current release slice needs.

What AeroBeat should own no matter what

A third-party platform can help distribute content, but AeroBeat should still own:

  • the canonical package shape and manifest rules
  • validation of untrusted submissions
  • bake/sign authority for approved runtime artifacts
  • the allow/deny decision for what the client may install or mount
  • first-party IDs, hashes, versions, and trust metadata
  • archival of re-bakable authored source packages

This separation matters because downloadable is not the same thing as trusted at runtime.

Practical near-term decision

For the current product direction, AeroBeat should:

  1. ship a first-party package and trust pipeline
  2. treat mod.io as the current chosen outer shell, while still keeping it replaceable and not the source of runtime truth
  3. optimize around PC community release first, while keeping future store/mobile paths open by avoiding vendor-defined package semantics

Bottom line

Use mod.io around an AeroBeat-owned trust core.

That gives AeroBeat the shortest path to useful UGC for the current Boxing + Flow PC community release, without locking the game's content model or runtime trust to a third-party vendor.