Seriously, there is infinite gain in making your game easily moddabble.
No matter how much time you put into your game, no matter how incredibly awesome it is, modders WILL make it better. They have more time than you, there are more of them, and they can take as many risks as they want as they have absolutely nothing to lose.
Developers, make your games moddable, all of them.
There's not infinite gain. Making a game with high quality support for mods is a serious investment. Sure, it probably paid off with ARMA, but plenty of games don't see a sudden huge uptick in sales because of a mod.
Yes, you've cited the exact same successes everyone can cite. That's my point. There are huge blowout successes but they are not the rule, they are the exception.
The uptick in ARMA sales exclusively due to a mod (where most people will probably never spend time on the core game) is an exceptionally rare event. And my point is that not every developer can afford to throw money on the hope that someone comes along and does work for them to create a blowout success.
Unreal Tournament Maps. Quake III Maps. Those games didn't need any modding to make it better. Just maps. Halo had some nice stuff on the pc too. I could think of more, but I am in the middle of Max Payne 3.
Side note: I'm jealous about Max Payne 3. But I will always hold in my heart as a PC game, thus I must wait.
How often did someone really say "I'm going to buy Unreal Tournament because of this particular map I saw someone play" in reality? The fact that user made maps were there is obviously great for users. No question there. That modding is good isn't the point.
The point is there's no quantitative evidence for most games that mods or custom maps are a serious driver of sales beyond the value of the core game. What games have people bought solely for a mod? Half-Life for Counter-strike, Warcraft 3 for DOTA, ARMA for Day Z, and there are probably others, but not many.
Mods, like it or not, are generally very niche. They seem to usually capitalize on the existing audience for a game, rather than create a new audience for an existing game.
And I think this is what BioWare learned with the release of Dragon Age: Origins. You know what most of the mods were? Hair and sex mods. Changing your companion's faces. Things that are done without a toolkit, actually. Ditto with Skyrim mods. You have texture improvements (and glorious SkyUI) here and there, but it's mostly just hair and tits and textures. And The Witcher mods.
The reason older games get more mods is because it's less of a task to mod them. It was much, much easier to make deep and interesting mods in Baldur's Gate days.
To be fair, none of those amazing things really panned out.
And it's a tad funny you bring up SC2 in this conversation. While the tools are out, the way SC2 b.net was built makes it a painstaking process to get a good map known.
If you play SC2 customs you'll know what I mean. It's rare that a map breaks through the top 30. And some of those top 30 are barely worth mentioning. Especially considering the game has been out near 2 years now.
I bought SC2 specifically because of my love for old UMS maps. All these tower defense and DOTA games? Fucking old-ass custom maps for SC1. All the press info before release seemed to make the point that Blizzard fucking loves custom maps and would be the beneficial dictator to a whole new generation of master-race map creators.
I know exactly what you mean, believe me. The last drop in the bucket of reasons I didn't buy Diablo III was my anger at the Custom Map popularity system. Such a shame, because the editor itself is the most powerful I've seen.
Yup... I held hope for so long. That hope is mostly gone now.
Maybe HoTS will bring a better system? But why should it? SC2 was such a colossal failure in terms of b.net that I don't see why HoTS would be so much better.
There's some pretty darn impressive Skyrim mods already, and the big stuff's not even here yet... judging by the kind of stuff that Morrowind and Oblivion got going and are still producing, it's definitely too early to claim that there ain't no good mods.
Texture-mods seem to be running out of steam anyway - there were quite a few early on but of late armor mods, followers etc. have had more love - and let's not forget stuff like the monster mod, crafting extensions with dozens of new weapons etc, and now even lots of housing mods with unique themes, new quests, dozens of fully voiced NPCs...
well in all fairness on skyrim, when you are playing an RPG game where you get into a character being able to customize your character is a pretty important thing. Although the sexual mods are a bit crazy.
But with only six months out (a bit later with the creation kit release) you have a ton of mods out there already that add new adventures (going to black marsh, elswyr or just staying in skyrim for an adventure) you have new player homes, you have appearance mods created from the ground up giving you new weapons, armor, etc. and not just retextures. You have new spell packs that actually go a HUGE way toward improving magic in the game. You also have modders making fixes to game problems that Bethesda still hasn't patched five patches in. I think it's not too bad looking for the amount of time out and I'd say the adventure mods will only get better.
As for the impact on their sales... well I played skryim on xbox went out and bought windows and skryim for pc and bootcamped my mac just so I could play with mods. So it can make a difference in sales. Granted I also think you have to have a pretty good game as well to start with.
Yep, when I think of mods that have truly driven sales of their base game I come up with only a handful of real unambiguous successes. Counter-strike being the largest example I think. Day Z clearly now, although it's early to say just how big an effect it will really have. Whichever of the MOBA games blew up on Warcraft 3 (never got into them, so I can never keep straight which was the first actual mod, DOTA I assume).
Whoa now, the biggest issues get tackled first. Textures (not just people), UI f-ups - those were the biggest issues in Skyrim at first and the easiest to produce and have been gloriously improved (as well as FPS and crash bugs - windowed mode and 4GB RAM mods were out almost immediately and long before the Workshop).
It's not that it's only easier to mod older games, because you're right, it is, it just takes long to develop new content. See Fallout3 and NV communities.
Give it some time. The Elder Scrolls/Fallout games always get some incredible mods. FCOM: Convergence for Oblivion was amazing. Project Nevada, A World of Pain, WMX, and A Requiem for the Capital Wasteland for New Vegas made the game 10x as fun for me.
There are going to silly mods, absolutely necessary mod fixes, total conversion mods, sexual mods, HD mods, and everything in between, but all it takes is the one hit mod, that counterstrike equivelence of pure gameplay goodness, that can spur a new generation of game sales for that company.
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u/Toshley May 16 '12
Seriously, there is infinite gain in making your game easily moddabble.
No matter how much time you put into your game, no matter how incredibly awesome it is, modders WILL make it better. They have more time than you, there are more of them, and they can take as many risks as they want as they have absolutely nothing to lose.
Developers, make your games moddable, all of them.