Ive been running ModDB.com proudly now for 13 years and I believe the simple answer to be, some people enjoy playing others enjoy creating. Their achievements are amazing and modders have pushed gaming so far forward in the last 15+ years

    > "The whole paid mod thing was really frustrating for us. 
    > Basically some people thought we kept it free for the wrong reasons.
    > I know it's just a case of those who shout the loudest are the ones
    > you'll hear but it was frustrating because we were certain people
    > appreciated our work and now we're not so certain anymore. 
    > It feels like they only appreciated it as long as it they 
    > get it for free.
    > 
    > "Even at the thought of players paying just one dollar - some began
    > threatening us and some of the reactions were so over board.
    > We heard the creator of SkyUI got death threats for what he proposed!"

It's sad that modding is limited to only the people that make a bunch of personal sacrifice like these guys who work 40-60 hour weeks full-time for free.

"Just add a tip jar", the first comment reads. Right, mate. You can head over to Wikipedia right now to see how hard it is to get people to give you money:

http://i.imgur.com/rOyVz43.png

I'd like to see Valve take another shot at baking mod monetization into the Steam platform.

It's more complicated than you think and there is several issues with mods become paid:

- Most of complex mods aren't made from scratch, they're heavily based off many other people's work, some free games assets and usually even illegally extracted assets from other games. Nobody care about that when it's not commercial activity, but for paid product issue with licensing is huge.

- Same issue with other copyrighted stuff that isn't game assets: trademark, fictional universes, etc. Currently there is a lot of freedom and you can do whatever you want, but once there going to be any money copyright holders include the worst ones going to put huge pressure on community. So mods based off books, movies, series going to end up with DMCA takedown notice really fast.

- % that belong to platform owner and game publisher is abysmal especially considering that some mods is hardly derivative work. So modder who crafter own everything (3D models, textures, animations) still going to give same cut as someone who just reused game assets.

- There is huge issues with quality and support. Even now there is issues with broken games on Steam and I have no idea how Valve can handle that. What worse modders can't fix some bugs on their own and there is many cases when game developers just don't care.

And that all not include fact that weird monetization model going to demotivate many tool and content creators. Not every game is suitable to sell hats.

    > I'd like to see Valve take another shot at baking mod monetization into the Steam platform.

I would be more happy to see platforms like Patreon become more popular. Support modders or teams directly is much better idea than selling mods. As example here is one of OpenMW developers:

https://www.patreon.com/scrawl

It's not huge amount of money, but OpenMW isn't most popular project around. This isn't really "mod" too, but I remember I seen few Minecraft mod creators there as well.

Yeah, pretty much this. I mean, back in the olden days one of the best mods for Doom was Batman Doom, which replaced the Doom enemies with the characters from the comic series and what not. It'd be a legal nightmare to try monetising something like that. Same with the various Lord of the Rings inspired mods for open world games, Zelda Total War, the various mods for GTA that adds characters and vehicles from other franchises...

Try and monetise mods, and you pretty much kill this part of the hobby all together.

Being one of the developers of the Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2 for the past 10 years, I can say I worked on it at first for the challenge of changing/fixing some stuff that I thought were broken in the vanilla game, and then for the potential of creating new gameplay with that foundation.

I'm not an artist, as me being here on HN can already tell, so my work was on the gameplay aspect of the game. Changing or adding new things to do, with the focus that teamwork should come first, and trying to make things more authentic with real life weapons/vehicles/tactics. I can say we were pretty successful with that goal, even with all the limitations of the game engine, and it's amazing how different from the original game the mod looks and plays.

We also saw people coming and going over all these years. By being a volunteer project, we get the cool thing of getting very passioned players that see the same potential that I did when I started. Not many will stay for long and that's normal, we only ask that people work on what they want. If something doesn't get worked on, oh well, so be it.

The community can't really complaint, if they do, we can always say: "if you want to change that, learn how, and do it yourself". And that's pretty much our process of getting new team members. It requires a lot of commitment to get something done right, so in that time we help as much as possible and see if the person will be a good fit to join the actual development team. Not just things like the actual quality of the work, but what their attitude is, if they listen to criticism well, if they work well with others, if they have initiative, if they have the same vision as the project, etc. If they seem fit, they start taking part of the actual decisions for the future of the mod.

My experience with the mod was priceless. It requires some strong leadership, like in any endeavor, and that leadership does change over time as people leave and others arise to the occasion. We have been managing it quite well, I would say, and it has been a fantastic project to have worked on.

Is PR2 effectively dead? Has the rapid progress of Squad helped PR in some way? How do you think Squad will affect PR as it stands today?

Many game developers say that modding it's great way to check if game development for you or not and I agree with them. Not everyone can try to become full-time developer for many reasons, but almost anyone can make some item for game they like, write story or make map.

I spend some time on modding in long time ago and now spending my free time on open source engine for game I play since 1999. Reason I doing that is to make it feature-complete so I can eventually implement my own additions to game mechanics and see how they going to work.

Also I always wish to work in game development, but life don't always work as we want to. I'd helped to test and support other commercial game as volunteer and now my own attempt to check how it's looks like to make games.

I feel like other people have similar motivation.

I don't understand how modding works. I mean, are the games even open source? How can you achieve such marvelous things without having access to the source code? I'm always impressed by the speed of which these mods come out after game release as well.

Most game engines are heavily content driven due to the common team makeup of a modern AAA title(last game I worked on was ~10 programmers and ~70 art/design). Sometimes you get a subset of the source(Half-Life/Quake era stuff was like this).

Some times you don't get any source but the tools are powerful enough to build an entirely new experience(see DOTA/Starcraft mods).

> Sometimes you get a subset of the source(Half-Life/Quake era stuff was like this).

My understanding was that the first Half-Life essentially was just a Quake mod. Amazing stuff.

Nah, from what I remember of the source(the modding SDK exposed a lot of the engine internals) it was a mix of Q1 + Q2(I think the Q2 part was mostly networking code).

Keep in mind there was Hammer(the level editing tool) which grew into it's own thing as well.

It was a Quake 1 / QuakeWorld mod... I remember playing it via GLQuake, only time I ever played a game more than two days in a row... played so much over that first weekend-week, my muscle memory reset, at work my hands didn't go to the home-row keys on the keyboard for a week.

This is going to vary wildly from game to game. The short verison is that a lot of games actually keep most of their content outside the EXE. This includes most of the actual gameplay: often, the EXE just contains the engine, and everything that makes the game the game is loaded from other files.

How easy this content is to access is going to vary wildly from game to game.

A lot of games stuff it in an undocumented binary format. Reverse-engineering that is often a pain in the ass, but typically once somebody pulls it off, they'll release tools to make modding easier. If you're lucky and the developer encourages modding, then they might even release official tools.

Other games store it in plain text files using a consistent scripting language. Really nice developers, such as Paradox, will even officially document the API. Actually, Paradox is one of my favorite developers for this: in addition to documenting everything, their scripting language is an easy-to-parse declarative language that mostly consists of nested key-value pairs.

Art assets, regardless of the game, are often in common industry formats that are readable by various existing editors. This can be good or bad: some of these formats require very expensive editors to read the art assets (e.g. 3DS MAX). Music assets use common formats, too: for example, a lot of small companies will just use Vorbis files because they don't want to pay royalties.

Unfortunately, if you're dealing with one of the few games that stuffs everything in the EXE, modding is very difficult and typically requires hacking the EXE with a hex editor. With modern games, this is virtually impossible more often than not (especially with DRM involved). With classic games, it's much easier. For example, it's fairly easy to mod most 8-bit and 16-bit console games by opening the ROM in a hex editor: most of the classic games have been thoroughly reverse-engineered and documented by modders, and there's a colossal wealth of resources available. With many games, there are even programs to make the process easier. Some of the really advanced modders will just disassemble the ROM, modify the ASM code as needed (most 8-bit and 16-bit console games were originally written in ASM to begin with, so this isn't as hard as it sounds), and then reassemble it.

The game logic in modern games is usually scripted in some form or other whilst the world mesh & textures are “just” data structures. Reverse engineer both & you can make a game engine dance to your own tune.

To stick with what I know - I certainly had a lot of fun messing around with Doom WAD files all those years ago and they were essentially a nice tidy package format that allowed everything to be changed - weapons, music and sound, levels etc. but I assumed that was more because id designed the game in such a way as to make modding easy.

Is that still the case with modern games or is there a lot more reverse engineering involved?

Another thought: It surprises me when people modify e.g. a game's networking code and similar "core" functionality which I would expect to be compiled into the game binaries.

It widely varies with modern games, but any experienced modder facing an isolated system will use some degree of reverse engineering from analyzing file formats to scanning functions, hooking, and building trampolines, etc.

This is also how cheats for games are developed, and some communities use more malicious forms of these modding techniques for technical challenge and the fun of it, and sometimes possibility of making a little side cash.

"Cracks" too I guess. I recently discovered the joy[1] of manually deobfuscating JavaScript by picking through it with a debugger so I can totally empathise with these people.

[1] And I mean that, it's a zen-like experience! :)

Just a note about font choice on this page. I spent half of the article quite unsure the name was SureAI or SureAl. I really think it's important to distinguish L from I in font, specifically in a case like this where it could have gone either way.

Duly noted, your feedback in this regard is most appreciated. Good eye!

I've never been into game modding, or development of games in general... I'm curious why more full-replacement mods don't just go with a full engine that's either open source or has a fairly liberal commercial license (unreal engine comes to mind here)?

Is it really that much harder to use a full engine and kit over modding and replacing everything in an existing game?