Modding Video Games Is Good For The Original Game Creators And Future Game Developers
from the breating-new-life dept
Earlier this year we talked about how a video game mod, DayZ, breathed new life into a 2 year old game, ARMA 2. This game was not a critical success by any means at release, but because the developer welcomed and made possible the ability for others to mod the game, it recently became one of Steam's best sellers thanks to the popularity of the DayZ mod. Reflecting on this success, the creators of the mod, Matt Lightfoot and Dean Hall, spoke about what creating the mod means for the original game developer and other potential developers.When asked how ARMA 2 developer Bohemian Interactive felt about the mod, Dean had this to say:
They’re very happy. The sales have been huge, just massive. By our calculations based on player IDs, you’re looking at 300,000 in sales, which is a very significant chunk of total ArmA 2’s sales. So they’re obviously very happy about that and it’s a validation for their strategy and focus with modding.By embracing the mod culture in video games, the original creators were able to reach out to more gamers and make more money. This is a very powerful tool that game creators can take advantage of. Yet some developers seem to not want it, at all. Very strange. Perhaps as more developers look at successes such as this one, they will learn to be a bit more accommodating to fans.
But what is in it for the modder? Most mods are released for free and so there is little financial incentive to create them. Dean also has something to say on that front:
Yes, I think modding is really good because you go along someone else’s footsteps and you can learn a lot about how someone else has done something. It’s kind of like reverse engineering things. You figure out what they’ve done, how their data structure works, how their engine works and all these other things.As a developer myself, this is something I can certainly attest to. You can learn far more by following and altering existing code than you can by trying to create something on your own. As you become more comfortable with inner workings of the programming languages or other tools you are using, you gain more confidence in your ability to create something from scratch. What better way to promote progress than to provide new developers the ability to learn from your work?
I think it is a really good place to start because you’re using someone else’s framework. If you want to cut your teeth straight in there with C++ I think that’s a lot to chew off and you can end up not getting exposure to all those issues that if you knew them would make a lot more sense when building your engine from scratch or using someone’s toolkit engine from scratch.
It is really great to see more discussion happening in the games industry about modding—and especially its potential to launch the careers of new developers. We have seen many mods such as Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft 3 mod, spawn very successful stand alone games, which is a goal that Dean and Matt hope to reach as a result of this very successful mod.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: arma 2, dayz, dean hall, matt lightfoot, mods, popularity, video games
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Developers devlopers developers!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Even small mods add a lot of value. Simple things like being able to import your own avatars, icons, flags, etc. really help the player invest in the game.
When game developers ignore the idea that their players might want to be creative also, they lose respect from me.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Bingo.
I used to take other people's stories and just change the names of the characters. Over time I started changing the stories themselves. After a while I began to understand how they wrote what they wrote and why...
Eventually I got good enough at it that I didn't want to use someone's elses story anymore I could make something far superiorly suited to my needs and tastes. And that's what I did from then on.
I did the same thing with artwork, mapping, modding, all sorts of skills. In the copyright world this is called being brainless/imaginative/unoriginal .etc But in the world of logic it's called self-teaching.
You cannot learn without copying. Even teachers will make you copy things (Such as letters, for small children learning the alphabet) until you learn them.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Doom, anyone?
Of course, speaking of learning something... I think most of us that learned how to play guitar immediately went out and tried to learn how to play some of our favorite (though easier) songs. Then you take components of them and try your own spin on them (say... and alternate guitar solo or a variation on the core riffs). It's not like we sat down and tried to reinvent the wheel. Same premise with coding here.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
It'd be one thing even if they limited modding that they'd actually provide a huge variety of options and customization.
But, they don't, World of Warcraft *cough* female Worgen *cough* with their 1 Derp-Chihuahua face comes to mind. Or how they brought in appearance tab but restricted it so much it almost made the entire thing pointless.
Now their new race they are adding the females only have 1 face... AGAIN. If I could mod the face I wouldn't care, but, I can't.
Diablo 3 is even worse I can't customize my character at all, and there's NO appearance tab just dyes.
I don't understand this new trend of limited options coupled with disallowing modding.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
To those of you that only play games on consoles, this is and always has been the standard for PC games.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
Using a private server with mod privileges is great because you can mix and match some things (like giving a fire spell to a warrior class character or heavy armor to a mage).
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
This kinda isn't remotely the same thing. If Xxsephirothxx wanted to make a new female Worgen face with a phallic design in the fur, I (and everyone else) would be forced to download it. However, when playing a mod for a game like Arma 2 (or Quake, or whatever), you actively seek out the server for the game mod you want to play (ie: Day Z), and download the files. Not everyone playing Arma 2 has to deal with how one person has modded it.
Side note: unless it's changed dramatically, you can actually fiddle around with WoW textures. I haven't looked at it since Wrath, but it's (was) doable, just not something they advertised.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Doom, anyone?
There was this server that had like 20+ gametypes more than half of them 100% user made content.
They had a racing gametype, a "lego-builder" where you can make houses with a gun that let you place/shoot blocks and objects around, some kind of "Japanese-Gameshow" type where you had to survive/navigate obstacle courses.
Entire port of the original Unreal game with multiplayer elements, some kind of "Defend your fort" game where you got to build your fort and then defend it from attacking monsters complete with an RPG level up system.
They even had an RTS gametype. I don't really remember the rest but there was alot.
I haven't gotten into the Morrowind mods, or the Neverwinter Nights 'modules', modding is truely the lifeblood of gaming.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Doom, anyone?
POLYGONAL FAP
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Doom, anyone?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re:
Also server ban all the spotted dick
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re:
Neverwinter Nights handled this situation really well.
They had something called an "override" folder where you could add in your appearance modifications and it would change them even on servers without your mod loaded.
No one else could see it, unless you gave them the files of course.
You can kind of do this in WoW but you can get banned for it, unfortunately.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Doom, anyone?
Scarred for life.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
A vast improvement on a previous idea, the birth place of innovation
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Doom, anyone?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
300,000 in sales
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Doom, anyone?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
This does NOT mean I completely threw away everything about them from the past, infact I tried to stay as close to the previous sources as possible while adding something new to them.
One cool example is Carl Banks/Don Rosa's Scrooge McDuck he wears all red, but in Disney's Ducktales he wears blue, in my personal crackfics he wears green+gold.
In the first example he is very greedy, the second he is still somewhat greedy but more soft, in the third the guy has pretty much said "fuck it" and while he keeps his cash he's now wholly embraces there's more to life than money.
Right there you can see artists building on top of previous works, starting with Carl Barks, Don Rosa built on his work, Disney built on their works and then I built on all of their works combined.
Unfortunately, Disney wants to control who builds on "their" stuff, fortunately I thought to myself "fuck Disney" and did it anyway.
I am now suddenly less capable of having my own characters? Nope. I have a bunch of them. Is what I did too Scrooge suddenly "unimaginative"? Not if you can reinvent him as has been done multiple times.
I even went as far as to pick my own hues/tones of his original colors and come up with new styles for his clothes.
And he's just one of several characters I've reinvented. NOT including new characters which must be invented from scratch then reinvented as they develop!
It's not just innovation it is also EVOLUTION.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re:
Expecting artists to create in a vacuum is like plopping cake-mix into a pan and expecting it to automatically bake with 6 layers of icing inside and fondant outside complete with decoration.
Sadly this isn't the case, you have to 're-invent' the cake by adding icing, fondant and decorations to it.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Expanding on modding
With TES5: Skyrim, they've worked with Steam to expand mod support by being the first game using Steam's new Mod repository, Steam Workshop. Things are still a bit bumpy, but it has turned out to be popular. I, personally, haven't used it much, but I see the appeal.
It's easy to be reluctent to support mods, though, when for every mod that fits nicely into the game world there are 20 mods of various fetishes, anime characters, nudity (which has caused media flak and changes in ESRB ratings), etc.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
In praise of modding
All hail community modding, I say!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
the games were so so until the modders got hold of them. I remember the delight of creating your own levels on Wolf 3d, or having a monster truck that went 200 mph in Need for speedIII.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Expanding on modding
But Skyrim's mods make a good game great. Same thing with Oblivion before it.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Doom, anyone?
:)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: 300,000 in sales
DayZ is ---how to describe--- frustrating, awesome, hairpullingly hard, hectic, brilliant, WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE! oh and it has zombies that spawn zombie armies of doom!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Anyone who remembers that is both old like me and probably as perverted too .
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
If this was all that happened, most people wouldn't care. But what really happens is that people look and play with the code a bit, copy it wholesale, and call it their own - without learning anything.
Moreover, these days to get the most performance out of a video game console programmers do some pretty slick stuff. It's the sort of "trade secret" that is worth keeping, a real advantage. Taking that ability away may make some not want to try so hard to make it better.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
First of all, it should be said that the DayZ team plan to make a standalone game of DayZ and the mod is really a way to test the waters and see how the final product should be.
It's their right and all, no issue there, but I'm not sure they can speak for all modders when they explain what's rewarding about modding - those guys made a mod for money, unlike the many people who make mods solely for the benefit of players.
Second, for a bunch of guys who have made something that relies on other people's work, they are very defensive of their own creation and how we use it. See this reddit thread for instance: http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/v0yqr/rocket_demands_takedown_of_kronzkys_dayz_sp/
(Check the comments for DayZ dev's response and a small debate between both parties)
To summarize the issue in the thread above: a guy (Kronzky) made a small mod that enables players to play DayZ solo. DayZ guys took issue with this and asked him to remove his mod from the web. Kronzky's mod did not use anything from DayZ and required DayZ to be installed.
Kronzky and the DayZ makers both have their own point of view on the issue, and quite frankly it's a little difficult to figure out who's telling the truth and who isn't. Kronzky claims that the DayZ guys don't want their mod to be playable in single player because it might hurt their ability to find a contract with a publisher, while the DayZ guys are accusing Kronzky's mod of helping cheaters.
Additionally, Kronzky claims that the DayZ guys got Bohemia Interactive (ARMA 2 developer) involved when they asked him to remove his mod, which if true is really odd seeing as DayZ is not supposed to be associated with Bohemia Interactive.
Finally, the DayZ guys are quite notorious for being very protective and controlling when it comes to their mod. They refuse to make it easy for people to host private DayZ servers (you need unofficial files to host your own server), and they enforce their own rules on all public official servers, which gets admins complaining a lot about cheaters and their inability to do anything about it because according to the rules they can't really ban anyone. Players are complaining too, because many would rather play on private servers or even solo.
A recent update of DayZ disabled the 'single player' option in the ARMA 2 menu, so now even with unofficial files you can't play solo anymore.
For modders, the DayZ guys really seem obsessed about forcing people to play their mod their way. And when called out on it, they hide behind excuses such as "cheaters", "this is to make sure we can keep making a quality product" and "we know better than consumers themselves what it is that they really want". Reminds you of anyone?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/27/grey-skies-are-gonna-kreia-up-kotor-2-com pleted/#more-117715
Point being that this has been making the rounds as news and likely will drive new sales of a old game. And we get to see the game as it was intended to be. I always felt kotor2 was on the edge of greatness but was too much of a buggy unfinished mess to really get their so I'm very much looking forward to replaying it with the restored content.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Reminds me of Disney.
"Fuck yeah good public domain stuff for our movies!"
"OH shit mickey mouse is about to enter the public domain, can't let those dirty rotten thieves get it!"
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]