
What keeps modders modding? - jsnell
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-12-13-what-keeps-modders-modding
======
intenscia
Ive been running ModDB.com proudly now for 13 years and I believe the simple
answer to be, some people enjoy playing others enjoy creating. Their
achievements are amazing and modders have pushed gaming so far forward in the
last 15+ years

------
danneu

        > "The whole paid mod thing was really frustrating for us. 
        > Basically some people thought we kept it free for the wrong reasons.
        > I know it's just a case of those who shout the loudest are the ones
        > you'll hear but it was frustrating because we were certain people
        > appreciated our work and now we're not so certain anymore. 
        > It feels like they only appreciated it as long as it they 
        > get it for free.
        > 
        > "Even at the thought of players paying just one dollar - some began
        > threatening us and some of the reactions were so over board.
        > We heard the creator of SkyUI got death threats for what he proposed!"
    

It's sad that modding is limited to only the people that make a bunch of
personal sacrifice like these guys who work 40-60 hour weeks full-time for
free.

"Just add a tip jar", the first comment reads. Right, mate. You can head over
to Wikipedia right now to see how hard it is to get people to give you money:

[http://i.imgur.com/rOyVz43.png](http://i.imgur.com/rOyVz43.png)

I'd like to see Valve take another shot at baking mod monetization into the
Steam platform.

~~~
SXX
It's more complicated than you think and there is several issues with mods
become paid:

\- Most of complex mods aren't made from scratch, they're heavily based off
many other people's work, some free games assets and usually even illegally
extracted assets from other games. Nobody care about that when it's not
commercial activity, but for paid product issue with licensing is huge.

\- Same issue with other copyrighted stuff that isn't game assets: trademark,
fictional universes, etc. Currently there is a lot of freedom and you can do
whatever you want, but once there going to be any money copyright holders
include the worst ones going to put huge pressure on community. So mods based
off books, movies, series going to end up with DMCA takedown notice really
fast.

\- % that belong to platform owner and game publisher is abysmal especially
considering that some mods is hardly derivative work. So modder who crafter
own everything (3D models, textures, animations) still going to give same cut
as someone who just reused game assets.

\- There is huge issues with quality and support. Even now there is issues
with broken games on Steam and I have no idea how Valve can handle that. What
worse modders can't fix some bugs on their own and there is many cases when
game developers just don't care.

And that all not include fact that weird monetization model going to
demotivate many tool and content creators. Not every game is suitable to sell
hats.

    
    
        > I'd like to see Valve take another shot at baking mod monetization into the Steam platform.
    

I would be more happy to see platforms like Patreon become more popular.
Support modders or teams directly is much better idea than selling mods. As
example here is one of OpenMW developers:

[https://www.patreon.com/scrawl](https://www.patreon.com/scrawl)

It's not huge amount of money, but OpenMW isn't most popular project around.
This isn't really "mod" too, but I remember I seen few Minecraft mod creators
there as well.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, pretty much this. I mean, back in the olden days one of the best mods
for Doom was Batman Doom, which replaced the Doom enemies with the characters
from the comic series and what not. It'd be a legal nightmare to try
monetising something like that. Same with the various Lord of the Rings
inspired mods for open world games, Zelda Total War, the various mods for GTA
that adds characters and vehicles from other franchises...

Try and monetise mods, and you pretty much kill this part of the hobby all
together.

------
muitocomplicado
Being one of the developers of the Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2 for
the past 10 years, I can say I worked on it at first for the challenge of
changing/fixing some stuff that I thought were broken in the vanilla game, and
then for the potential of creating new gameplay with that foundation.

I'm not an artist, as me being here on HN can already tell, so my work was on
the gameplay aspect of the game. Changing or adding new things to do, with the
focus that teamwork should come first, and trying to make things more
authentic with real life weapons/vehicles/tactics. I can say we were pretty
successful with that goal, even with all the limitations of the game engine,
and it's amazing how different from the original game the mod looks and plays.

We also saw people coming and going over all these years. By being a volunteer
project, we get the cool thing of getting very passioned players that see the
same potential that I did when I started. Not many will stay for long and
that's normal, we only ask that people work on what they want. If something
doesn't get worked on, oh well, so be it.

The community can't really complaint, if they do, we can always say: "if you
want to change that, learn how, and do it yourself". And that's pretty much
our process of getting new team members. It requires a lot of commitment to
get something done right, so in that time we help as much as possible and see
if the person will be a good fit to join the actual development team. Not just
things like the actual quality of the work, but what their attitude is, if
they listen to criticism well, if they work well with others, if they have
initiative, if they have the same vision as the project, etc. If they seem
fit, they start taking part of the actual decisions for the future of the mod.

My experience with the mod was priceless. It requires some strong leadership,
like in any endeavor, and that leadership does change over time as people
leave and others arise to the occasion. We have been managing it quite well, I
would say, and it has been a fantastic project to have worked on.

~~~
runjake
Is PR2 effectively dead? Has the rapid progress of Squad helped PR in some
way? How do you think Squad will affect PR as it stands today?

------
SXX
Many game developers say that modding it's great way to check if game
development for you or not and I agree with them. Not everyone can try to
become full-time developer for many reasons, but almost anyone can make some
item for game they like, write story or make map.

I spend some time on modding in long time ago and now spending my free time on
open source engine for game I play since 1999. Reason I doing that is to make
it feature-complete so I can eventually implement my own additions to game
mechanics and see how they going to work.

Also I always wish to work in game development, but life don't always work as
we want to. I'd helped to test and support other commercial game as volunteer
and now my own attempt to check how it's looks like to make games.

I feel like other people have similar motivation.

------
Kiro
I don't understand how modding works. I mean, are the games even open source?
How can you achieve such marvelous things without having access to the source
code? I'm always impressed by the speed of which these mods come out after
game release as well.

~~~
vvanders
Most game engines are _heavily_ content driven due to the common team makeup
of a modern AAA title(last game I worked on was ~10 programmers and ~70
art/design). Sometimes you get a subset of the source(Half-Life/Quake era
stuff was like this).

Some times you don't get any source but the tools are powerful enough to build
an entirely new experience(see DOTA/Starcraft mods).

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> Sometimes you get a subset of the source(Half-Life/Quake era stuff was like
> this).

My understanding was that the first Half-Life essentially was just a Quake
mod. Amazing stuff.

~~~
vvanders
Nah, from what I remember of the source(the modding SDK exposed a lot of the
engine internals) it was a mix of Q1 + Q2(I think the Q2 part was mostly
networking code).

Keep in mind there was Hammer(the level editing tool) which grew into it's own
thing as well.

~~~
tracker1
It was a Quake 1 / QuakeWorld mod... I remember playing it via GLQuake, only
time I ever played a game more than two days in a row... played so much over
that first weekend-week, my muscle memory reset, at work my hands didn't go to
the home-row keys on the keyboard for a week.

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foldor
Just a note about font choice on this page. I spent half of the article quite
unsure the name was SureAI or SureAl. I really think it's important to
distinguish L from I in font, specifically in a case like this where it could
have gone either way.

~~~
kelvin0
Duly noted, your feedback in this regard is most appreciated. Good eye!

------
tracker1
I've never been into game modding, or development of games in general... I'm
curious why more full-replacement mods don't just go with a full engine that's
either open source or has a fairly liberal commercial license (unreal engine
comes to mind here)?

Is it really that much harder to use a full engine and kit over modding and
replacing everything in an existing game?

