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LucasArts Embraces Game Mod Community
An anonymous reader writes "LucasArts has taken a great step in promoting the modification of their titles and supporting the communities that love them! According to this press release, LucasArts has teamed up with LFNetwork to open LucasFiles.com. The site is dedicated to all files that fall in the LucasArts realm." Given competing games like Neverwinter Nights, which have a phenomenal amount of user-created add-ons, this is a very smart move for LucasArts.
Very smart indeed! Just think about how successful Counter-Strike is. Sierra/Valve doesn't make anything from Counter-Strike but they make boat-loads from the Half-Life game that you need to run Counter-Strike.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Which is why the modding communities should maybe make something based on original content instead of other's copywritten works?
LucasArts attitude towards fan developers (who are probably its best customers) is astonishingly short-minded and sometimes insulting.
I'm thinking particularly of their shutting down the Star Wars Modelling Alliance, a fan site devoted to developing (surprisingly good) models of Star Wars characters and creatures. The sheer amount of creative work that came out of people using those models was astonishing. In additional to publishing a lot of great freeware models the site would also post some of the "pictures" and "films" that people had made, etc.. Some were complete gems - one that sticks out particularly in my mind involved a few ATSTs rampaging around urban London.
Perhaps there is someone associated with the site here that knows better, but I was always under the impression that their persistent and long-lasting "hardware difficulties" which started shortly after E1 came out boiled down to letters from the legal department at LucasFilm.
It is a real pity that existing law is structured such that market-regulation can be used to crush non-market creativity.