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?"

Comments

The questions developers ask

[Anonymous Coward]

How much do I make off mods?
Nothing

And where are most of my sales?
On consoles.

And where are most of my pirates?
On the PC.

Who do modding tools benefit?
Only the PC gamers.

Does developing modding tools cost me?
Yes.

And remind me again how much I make off any given mod?
Jack and shit. And Jack left town.

I think I've made my decision.

Re:The questions developers ask

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the difference between a good developer and a crap dev. A good dev will put years into their product, and give a game that people truly love like an artisan spending months to years on a single piece. A crap dev will crap out a product every 6 months, make a truly forgettable game (it has to be otherwise people won't buy the next one in 6 months time!) like cheap imported furniture that is going to fall apart in a year anyway.

Re:The questions developers ask

[Kreigaffe]

DayZ is responsible for more sales of Arma2 than Arma2.

Re:The questions developers ask

[morari]

The Team Fortress franchise in itself started as a mod for Quake.
Counter-Strike started out as a mod.

Re:The questions developers ask

[geminidomino]

This exactly what Runic Games (Torchlight/Torchlight II) did, and it got them a lot of good will and a lively and loyal, if small, community around them.

Supposedly, Bethesda claimed to have done the same thing. Having tried to use the Skyrim mod tool, though, I can't imagine that the devs used it day after day and haven't strung someone up by their toenails in the breakroom yet...

Re:The questions developers ask

[PopeRatzo]

A crap dev will crap out a product every 6 months, make a truly forgettable game (it has to be otherwise people won't buy the next one in 6 months time!) like cheap imported furniture that is going to fall apart in a year anyway.

I think this is one reason for piracy.

I enthusiastically purchase well-made games that are enjoyable. I can think of one game that I've logged hundreds of hours on and that I've purchased four times (once on PC, once for console and two for gifts to friends). If the company announced they were making a sequel, I wouldn't hesitate to pay 0-day price and pre-order.

There are other games, that for various reasons, feel like nothing but money-grabs by developers who are out of ideas. Unfinished, unloved and leaving me pissed off.

I recently played a game called "Gas Guzzlers Combat Carnage" by some indie studio (I think in Eastern Europe) called Gamepire that was a hoot to play, worked very well and cost less than $20. I even wrote the devs a fan letter telling them I hoped they'd go bigger and do a "Burnout Paradise"-style game with lots of wild arcade racing and crashes and explosions and stunts and stuff, because they did Gas Guzzlers with such elan and a sense of fun. It's basically Forza with guns. Good single player, good multi-player. Good all around.

But when a company has done such a bad job over and over, and ripped people off by not giving them value, I don't see how it's a surprise that people are pirating their games instead of laying out $60.

I know for a fact that there are people who have pirated a game and then liked it so much that they went and bought a copy. I actually think this is pretty common.

I'm not convinced that a big shakeout in the PC gaming industry is a bad thing. There are a lot of big-name game companies that are putting out crap and ripping people off and deserve to go out of business.

Re:The questions developers ask

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention you have to look at how mods can give your game real legs. I recently rebought Freelancer which is from like 2004 because i lost the box in my last move, why would i buy such an old game? the Mods frankly make that game fricking HUGE! Hundreds of systems, stations, bases, factions, you can be a pirate or a miner, join guilds, they created this huge expansive world around the game. And there is no reason you game devs can't make money off the mods either, just look at how Running With Scissors packaged up their Postal 2 with several mods as the "Fudge Pack" and sold quite a few copies.

But you are right, the grey sludge producing bean counters that want a game to be usable exactly X amount of time (so they can sell you the next grey sludge, ala EA) don't want mods because they figure if people are enjoying game A then they might not be willing to buy the same game with one or two features tacked on for another $60. Hell most of the shooters being released today are so damned generic that if you squinted you probably couldn't tell which game you were looking at. Those kinds of devs HATE modders, because often the modders frankly make the game better than they do. For an example Red Faction: Guerrilla with the weapon mods is actually pretty damned fun, without them? Royally sucks, might as well just stay in the truck and just run over everything...yawn.

Re:The questions developers ask

[VortexCortex]

How much do I make off mods?

It's hard to say, but it's substantial: Mods are free advertizing. Advertizing costs money. Ergo, Mods are worth free advertizing to me. The Doom & Quake Modding communities are still around, and people are still buying the original games -- Even though the engine is open sourced! Why? To make & play mods. The source-ports and many game mods require the original assets. Total conversions like Freedoom are not compatible with all the mods, so the huge library of mods drive original game sales. The point is that it's far from "Nothing"

Seriously, "nothing" is a very deceptive and/or ignorant answer.

And where are most of my sales?

PC and Mobile, because Consoles have an artificially elevated barrier to entry, and the console market has severe discoverability issues -- Though this really doesn't matter much when it comes to mods, you'll see why two answers below.

And where are most of my pirates?

Piracy isn't a problem, It's more free advertising. "Pirates" are more likely to pay for, and get the word out about, my next game. One example: I bought myself and my nephew several games that he found out about while playing at his friend's house -- his friend pirated the games because he's a teen with no cash. That pirate made up for his piracy 200%

You can't stop piracy -- It's a symptom of an artificial scarcity system -- A BAD economic model. Piracy is only possible because we don't get paid enough up front for making the game & try to recoup costs after the fact. I'm working to change this, but it takes a strong reputation to bootstrap into the new model where I can give games away after they've been built (hey, it's just like working for a Publisher, I only want to get paid for actually doing the work -- works for mechanics and all other labour industries).

Who do modding tools benefit?

Primarily: The Game Developers. Yep, without them I wouldn't be able to make games. In fact, before I can even make a game, I must make "modding tools" to create everything from font rendering & GUIs, to level editors and multi-texture combining visualisers. Some dev studios require much simpler tools, others license engines that come with said tools -- Let me repeat that: THE ENGINE COMES WITH MODDING TOOLS. Considering that we've got to make the modding tools anyway, and that the tools themselves aren't really useful without an engine to go with it, the modding tools are only worth NOT distributing if you plan to increase the artificial scarcity of DLC. Which is dumb. People will just make their own (inf | sup)erior mod tools. Inferior tools produce mods that make your game look like crap to others on Youtube; Superior tools help folks create content that drives sales of the game and showcases what others can do -- Ding Ding Ding! More Engine Licensing Deals!

Does developing modding tools cost me?

Yes, but that's part of the cost of making the damn game! You think we dump 3D graphics and textures in a folder with the engine and it magically becomes a game?! Nope. True, some modding tools are created as plugins for 3DS Max or Maya or Blender, etc, but the point is: We've got to make them anyway. Furthermore, it may cost NOTHING! That's right! NOTHING. Sometimes folks actually reuse software...

And remind me again how much I make off any given mod?

For the high quality official in-house made mods? Well, DLC goes for anywhere between 1% and 10% of the original game sale price, or 50-100% of the original game sales for expansion packs. The sales figures vary wildly depending on how well the game has done. For community made mods, the answer's even more complex (see above), but it's provably infinitely more than "jack shit".

Re:The questions developers ask

[Penguinisto]

He's not an outlier. I've done the same thing nearly 14 years ago, just for the hell of it.

A bunch of guys took Quake 2 (then Quake3, then Unreal Tournament), and all together, we made one hell of a mod out of it.

The result wasn't counted in dollars, but was counted in untold hours of solid fun gameplay for thousands of people. Almost everyone involved did it for fun, and even looking at it from well over a decade, it was still worth it.

Y'all can keep your hypothetical $10m that 99.9% (or so) of all aspiring game designers will never see. I'll keep the awesome memories gathered over years of kick-ass gameplay and a ton of sweat.

Re:The questions developers ask

[Canazza]

Here's a handy checklist of wrong reasons to make a video game:
  - Are you making the same game two or more years in a row? (Bonus points for adding the Year onto the end of the name)
  - Is your game an clone of another, more successful game, adding no new features and having near identical art assets?
  - Do your long-term goals revolve around a microtransaction model that requires people to pay money not to be Kerb-stomped?

Each boil down to "I'm making this game to make some quick cash" whether it be by taking an initially inovative and fun game and reskinning it every year, wholesale lifting of game mechanics from another game you *dont* own the rights to and reskinning it, or creating a potentially fun game, but requiring people to constantly fork out cash just to have fun (I'm mostly looking at World of Tanks in this case, as well as alot of Mobile games).

Games made for those reasons are rarely remembered - they might make a shittone of cash, and that's why they keep getting made - but in the same way that 9 out of 10 Rom Coms won't be remembered in 2 years time, these games will fall by the wayside, meanwhile games that have some love put into them a decade ago are still selling today.

Like one of the GPPs said, people are still playing Freelancer. There's still a community for a bunch of old X games too. The Modding scene for Oblivion has seen it still being bought today, even after Skyrim - which also has a decent modding community now - was released.

Companies like Valve and Acti-Blizzard have seen the way forwards for modding, the Steam Workshop and SC2's map/mod store thing (I don't know what it's called I don't play SC2) allow people to look for mods and maps in-game, download them through a common interface and play them right away.

When it comes to Valve, look at the PeTI for Portal 2 or the community submissions workshop for TF2 (which actually shares revenue with creators who've had their stuff put in-game) - They became the giant they are today because of the loyalty of their fans, which for the most part came from how moddable their games are.

Rebirth

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean rebirth?
PC gaming is in full swing..

Re:Cap

[Colonel Korn]

Why spend $2k on a pc rig, in order to play a game that I can play for free on onlive?

Because OnLive will cause you to hit your ISP's monthly cap earlier. Or because not all games are on OnLive.

Or because OnLive under the very best conditions has terrible graphical degradation and noticeable input lag.

People who buy the game for the mods

[tepples]

How much do I make off mods?
Nothing

I disagree. Would Valve have made as much money from Half-Life if there were no Counter-Strike?

And where are most of my sales?
On consoles.

If you're a sufficiently large developer. Do XNA games released on Xbox Live Indie Games outsell comparable PC games?

Does developing modding tools cost me?
Yes.

Developing level and scenario editing tools in the first place costs you. Why not continue to polish them and release them a few months later so that you can make a few bucks off players who will buy a game for the mods?

Human resources

[tepples]

I just realized that you appear to have forgotten a question:

Where do I find artists and programmers to hire for my next game?
From the modding community.

no to f2p

[PopeRatzo]

I'll tell you what's NOT the future of PC gaming: "Free to Play".

I've never seen so much crap. It's a bad idea, executed badly, and if a game developer thinks that free-to-play is the way to go they need to look for a job in a call center somewhere.

I went into it with an open mind, but after a year of not being able to play any F2P game more than about 5 minutes, I'm convinced that it's an idea that needs to die a painful public death.

It's not that it's a good idea being done badly. It's a bad idea that actually encourages bad execution.