[goofyballer]

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Then, thoroughly QAing each one is another huge chunk of time. This isn't just "play it once or twice and make sure it seems okay", it's more like "beat on the level in every possible way, test every possible exploit, soak test it for a week straight and make sure it doesn't run out of memory, etc...".

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True, I guess this would work better for user-made maps than for mods. I don't think custom maps using standard game features would need a lot of testing though as long as the game engine itself is pretty robust (of course, I haven't done level editing since Doom, where it was pretty hard to mess up "here are some linedefs, LET'S MAKE A SECTOR!").

Or, perhaps selling user-made content for like $1 or $2 a pop would motivate devs to put in the energy to perform quality control on user submissions. That's a pretty reasonable fee to add new functionality to a $60 game and it's probably reasonable to expect that the best submissions will be worth a couple hundred thousand downloads (at least - in Halo, a good map would prob get a mil or two) for the company, so they could actually turn these into a pretty decent cash cow.

And as for the concern of being flooded with material, for cross-platform games it's quite possible the PC community can decide. The PC has the same issue as far as "if 1% of 1 million users are making maps" and the better maps will naturally become more popular and get more exposure among PC enthusiasts. Whichever maps those turn out to be are easy candidates for X360 submission.