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Mods: "Lifeblood of Gaming Industry"?
Jadsky writes "Salon is is running a story about how modifications to games are now the lifeblood of the industry. It cites "Day of Defeat", an add-on to Half-Life, and proceeds to give an analysis of the history and current work on game mods. It also mentions Castle Smurfenstein and the Doom Construction Kit, which many of us played with before there was z-space."
Let people play *with* the game as well as *in* the game. And you still make money. If only other software companies would learn this lesson.
Besides the usual awful AppleSoft BASIC hacks, my earliest (and fondest) memories of game tinkering were with Pinball Construction Set's awesome built-in editor. IIRC, it was the first game to ship with out-of-the-box modding support. EA was way ahead of its time, one might say...
Bill Budge is my hero.
y
I've been playing it for months, but it's starting to feel a little long in the tooth.
Don't nobody at Bungie care if you get bored of a game after many months. They businesses, and they in business to SELL games, not support them.
You know you woulda bought that game anyway and you know you gonna buy the next one when it comes out too, cause it was tight when you got it and you already got a few good months outta playin it. That's all they was sellin right there. A game that would keep you instrested until the next new $hit come out. Ain't no money in helping your customers re-use the same played out $hit foreva.
Na'am sayin?
That, IMHO, CounterStrike is STILL selling copies of Half-Life, while the game itself is getting pretty old. This is a proven case where a mod was more popular than the origional game.
The even made a box edition because it was selling so well.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
It's a great piece of work.
;-)
The best WW2 game I know. That includes realism in the first place. That's the key. Sounds, models, movements, weapons, how weapons work etc.
Personaly, that's the only online game I play.
Now, as for lifeblood...
You know, from the developer point of view, the mod is created for particular game as a hobby of course, but you want your mod to be playable on as many computers as possible.
And Half-Life exists on very many computers. It was game of the year by all accounts, and sometimes even for more than one year.
And then Counter-Strike came (which is popular due to the same reason - popularity of base game). And even more people bought the game.
Half-Life is 3 years old now. And it's not the same as it was. High-quality models, voicecomm and netcode fixes really transformed the base game. And mods take advantage of it.
Actualy, HL it coming very close to what TF2 was supposed to be. Will we see TF2 as a mod for HL?
The only problem is that it only supports 32 players.
In the end, I (the consumer) win. Mods are free. Woohoo. I bought HL to play CS. Valve releases new patch with voicecomm. Free. I fed up with CS and switched to DoD. Free. Then they release new version (2.0), totaly new gameplay (and much better too). Free.
Some people have use the 3d engines and level editors to create cheap/fast 3d movies. Different players act as the movie camera.
u dio360/show102701.html
http://www.illclan.com/
http://www.wnyc.org/st
Licenses are the lifeblood of the gaming industry.
Mods are bloody cool, but
a) You don't get them on consoles, and console games make up the majority of games sales.
b) They do add value to a game, but for the majority of games with modding ability, the reality is that only a small community of dedicated players actually make/use them.
point b) is a good thing,as it means that the minority who are modding are actually concentrating on a small set of games, rather than being spread around between many games.
The only game I can think of that has resulted in a measureably large increase in sales due to mods is Half-Life, as a result of Counter-Strike and TeamFortress. I suppose you could also say MS Flight Simulator is another example, but really - there aren't many. Quake (I, II, III etc...) have probably been helped by mods, but I don't think their sales have been driven by mods in the same way Half-Life's has.
2 games series, mechwarrior & quake.
Back in the days of 1996 you had two large communities. Quake and Mechwarrior. There were leagues for both, there were active online players of both.
One you could expand (Quake) and one you couldn't (Mechwarrior)
Quake community grew and grew and as the game changed and became more advanced so did those doing the mods, maps, and skins. They spawned Weapons Factory, Rocket Areana, Ubran Terror.. countless maps, and even more numerous skins. The code was open, the architectire was open(.pk3).We got statistical tracking, we got cross referencing those stats. Other game developers caught on and we got RTCW, MOH, DoD, and the one i'm hooked on..Kedi Knight 2: Outcast. Open game, active community.
Now take a look at the Mech community, that was around at the same time. Everyone was in a clan, a huge percent of players were involved in leagues. The game wasn't open but the mechs were(a text file). That spawned mech editors, NAIS(mercs), cheat detectors, and mech organizers( i have 500 varients). That was it tho..untill Microsoft stepped in. Mechwarrior today has had all the "sim" like features stripped out of it, skins are difficult to make(they provide no blanks). There are 0 mods, there are 0 apps, it keeps log files in some non standard format...but uploads stats IN BINARY! to microsoft tracking servers(hacking would be against DCMA).
so 2 genres, 2 communities starting at about the same time. Its pretty easy to see that its not "if you build it they will come" but rather "IF YOU LET THEM build it THEMSELVES, they'll come running!"
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
I must admit I always found unreal tournament a bit boring. However I've been hooked for months already on a modification for it: strikeforce. Without that modification (and many others), unreal tournament wouldn't have survived long on my harddisk. Strikeforce is an absolutely brilliant mod. Great maps, great gameplay.
I had the same with the original unreal. Single player was fun while it lasted. After that I kept the game around to play the mods.
Jilles
You know, one of the reasons I've always liked PC games better than console games is the ability to get mods, updated rosters, etc., through the Internet.
I mean, would anyone still be buying Half-life if we didn't want it to play CS and DoD?
I wonder if, once we can have Linux on our PS2's, we'll see mods for GTA3 and the like.
Does anyone know if it's possible to release mods for console games?
On the web, if you go for the few remaining gaming news sites, it is easy think that mods are the center of the universe. But then you look at where the serious action is in gaming:
1. Big console titles like GTA3, MGS2, FFX, Halo.
2. Monster PC titles like The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon. The Sims has sold over 6.5 million copies.
then you get a different feeling. Are mods interesting and important? Yes. But lets not get carried away. In reality the communities surrounding games like Half-Life and Unreal tend to be self-serving and isolated, with notable exceptions (gotta mention Counterstrike). You just don't find all that much innovation in mods for, say, Unreal. Now, sure, the mod community will argue otherwise, but that's what I meant by "isolated."
You think Blizzard doesn't just care about money? Blizzard is owned by Vivendi Universal and I can guarantee you they only care about money. I run the boycottblizzard.org site.