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The Rebirth of PC Gaming? Bring On the Modders!
Deathspawner writes "The future of PC gaming is oft-debated, but one thing's for certain: modding has always made it better. With that, wouldn't it make sense for developers to focus more on giving the community the modding tools it needs? Further, couldn't publishers look to modding as a way to increase revenue, by allowing modders to sell their sanctioned creations? Valve already offers robust community options in its Steam platform — and already has payment processing in place. Is this the natural next step for PC gaming?"
How much do I make off mods?
Nothing
Many games make most of their PC sales because of mods. ARMA2 is a good example given by another poster, but each and every Bethesda game is an even bigger one.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm a Rome Total War modder, so my knowledge of modding is mainly restricted to the Total War franchise, and how The Creative Assembly deals with modding.
But I think that it's probably the same thing everywhere.
When people think of mod tools, they often think of an editor which allows to modify textures/models and scripts, for the most part. While that's great because it allows beginner to easily mod a few things, that's only minor modding.
The problem is that while it's fun to change the texture of a horse to a bunny with a hat, it's not those kind of mods that TFA is talking about.
It's the total overhaul mods that make modding so good, like Counter Strike. And with the amount and diversity of modifications needed, no tools is going to be able to do it.
In RTW, most files are text files, which means that basically everything that is not hardcoded in the exe can be changed using Notepad. The only place where a tool is needed is for art ressource, as those are packed. And for RTW, it wasn't CA that released this tool, but a guy who reversed-engineering the packing system. In the subsequent release Medieval II Total War, CA actually released a tool to unpack things, because they had added protections.
The newer TW games however don't have the same major mods, because they changed the way data is structured. Things which used to be rather easy to do are now (almost) impossible, simply because no one can access the data in a useful manner. Because of the thriving modding community created by the previous games, there are a few people that are painfully trying to make sense of things, but HEX editing is a huge pain, and has huge limitations.
All of that to say that modders don't really need tools like editor (though they are quite nice).
What they need is a way to access and modify data easily (which can be through a tool like an unpacker, or a converter), and documentation/information to make sense of it.
How much do I make off mods?
Nothing
Yeah because Valve hasn't made a dime off of Counter-Strike, right? I mean they've only shifted 27 million units in the franchise since buying the rights to the mod. I'm sure they really regret opening that can of worms now.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Games that benefit from modding off the top of my head:
The Sims, Sims 2, Sims 3...
Elder Scrolls Series
Starcraft
Halflife series
Portal 2 (added a mod tool to stir new sales about a month ago)
Civilization series
Torchlight series
World of Warcraft (heck, almost all MMO's for that matter)