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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
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.
What do you mean rebirth?
PC gaming is in full swing..
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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?
At least that's what the /. articles were saying back then. Maybe it's just FUD like the movie-makers in the 1950s who said TV would kill theaters.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Making mods or custom maps is only viable when you can run your own servers on which to play them. Nowadays most new games have servers that are run by the game publishers themselves, if this is the case how do you persuade the publisher to run the mod on them?
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Looking back over 25 years of computer gaming modding has pretty much always improved sales. From the days of the original Civ games to Wolfenstein to Doom to NeverWinter Nights vs NeverWinter Nights 2 examples abound. Those games that support the community readily modding them have pretty much always had better sales than those that didn't.
Simple example would be NeverWinter Nights vs NeverWinter Nights 2 for an example in point. Embrace your user community and you will be rewarded in sales for years to come. Pull a Sony and you'l end up with a (what was the name of their PSP replacement again?)....
When game developers start developing modding tools for their games, it seizes to be a PC-only advantage. They can just as well release those tools for other platforms, right?
Since when do companies like Nintendo, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Apple's iOS division allow developers to release modding tools?
Keyboard and mouse support
The last time I checked, Microsoft still refused to make a mouse driver for Xbox 360. Or are you calling Kinect a mouse substitute?
Sufficient memory for editing tools
How so? Wii has 64 MB of RAM and 24 MB of VRAM.
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.
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.
I would think that this could greatly improve the value of console gaming as well.
Think about it: as a publisher, you get paid twice. (Once for the PC version and its deveopment tool suite, and again for the console version for testing.) The number of interesting DLC packages would be enorous. Many may even be free. It will greatly increase the desirability of your games.
"But won't it compete with our paid DLC?!"
Not if the community DLC requires it as a dependency for core functionality. Then the community DLC will actually add additional value to your paid DLC, and people will want it more.
So, why aren't you guys doing it?
It's good that Planetary Annihlation will have support for modding and Linux :)
So give them your voice and some of your cash by funding them on Kickstarter and then next year we'll all happily be destroying planets!
http://unfix.org
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Bethesda doesn't make games, they make tech demos for mod tools.
I am amazed no one has listed Minecraft as a testament to modding helping a game grow. It's one of the top selling PC games of all time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games and modding is almost an integral part of the Minecraft community.
hl1 would have been forgotten if it weren't for counter strike. because of cs they had the incentive to keep updating and to add licensing servers, online drm and eventually an online distribution platform for selling the thing(steam).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.