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NYT on Game Mods
Bansuki writes "The New York Times has an article about the role of the modding communities in the games industry. It's a decent overview of the current state of modding though it focuses heavily on Epic Games and the Unreal engine. They spotlight the Unreal University program (an Unreal sponsored event giving classes to potential modders) and Red Orchestra (a highly ambitious mod of the Unreal Warfare engine). The article also mentions machinima as a type of mod with artistic potential and gives due credit to Id Software and Bioware for their work in making engines available to the community. But here's a glaring omission: Half-life and its wildly successful mods. Odd."
Mods like Counter-Strike are a boon to developers. Its like having people who work for free. I know that valve has taken CS under their wing now but there are many mods that keep games playable - with no work on the part of the developers. Imagine all the people who bought half-life so they could play counter-strike on the internet (or DoD or TF)? Originally CS was just a couple of nerds with some free time on their hands.. Not to mention that you can't make everyone happy.. mods let people take a great engine and make a game that is "boring" to them fun. Some people like CS, others prefer TF, some are into DoD.. I'm pretty sure that many of those people never bother to play multiplayer HL.