Is Moddability Required?

PC Gamers like to bitch and moan about some very specific things. We complain about bad ports. We complain about not getting content. We complain about DRM.

One of the oddest complaints though is about moddability and dedicated servers.

It's a good complaint given our history. Great games like Half-Life provided gamers not only with a solid game, but also the tools to make their own content. This led to not only customizations but even led to some of the biggest game changers in the industry. Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Civilization 5's development team, and many more are the direct result of gamers getting into the guts of a game, making new and innovative features, and then sending them along to the playerbase.

It jives very well with the PC Gamer's mentality. We are hardwired to try and get the most out of our money no matter what. We overclock our hardware. We demand games to last 40+ hours of exciting gameplay for our $50. And that is besides having a competitive and fun multiplayer to boot. We really truly are greedy. And so mods were awesome. You already own the game, now enjoy this mod which takes the game and makes it better, or maybe even makes a whole new game. And sometimes that new game even is more successful than the original.

Truly we have a rich history of modding and control. Not only do we make whole new game types, but we also tweak our servers to cater to specific desires. If the original online multiplayer didn't have persistent stats, we added them in. If we wanted to let players purchase reserved slots so they could always join by kicking a non-paid member, we added it in. If we wanted to change the game to one-shot kills, infinite grenades, and the ability to fly, we modded it in.

However, I think we may have reached a turning point.

With the rise of digital distribution, we now have outlets to sell smaller, less polished, nuggets of games. Games that only last a few hours and priced at $5 are available to mass consumption. Before, the only way to get your game out was through forums, downloads, and your rewards were accolades of praise and the occasional donations. Now, you can sell instantly. Also, indie games are well cataloged and tracked in order to be sold. The modding community lacks the same kind of structure universally with only a few select ever making headlines, and typically these are only for first-person shooters. Indie games show up on front pages of Steam, the largest digital distributor of PC games. Mods of varying quality show up every now and then in a magazine.

We have reached saturation of games. There are more games available than you can ever play, even if you're a dedicated game tester. So, everyone must now be judicious about what they purchase. What little time they still have has to be spread over several releases. Gone is the time when one game would rule as king for several months. Now there are block buster games sold every month of the year, and lots of smaller games every day. And that's just for the PC. Many people also play on other systems, such as their iPhone, Nintendo DS, XBox, Wii, PlayStation, browser Flash games, Facebook, and many others. Do you need your game to last you six months? Not really, there's plenty of other games to take its place.

We have reached the point where tools and standalone engines are commonplace. You don't need to own a game on the iPhone before you can play the next Tower Defense game. You don't need a game to develop a new game for the iPhone. You register as a developer, download the tools, and start building. Similarly, the Unity Engine, Unreal Development Kit (UDK), and many other platforms allow you to rapidly build a game within an engine and then send it out as a standalone package independent of other games. Even more amazing is how quickly anyone can build a game using these tools. I remember hacking around in the StarCraft World Editor and just trying to build a basic Chess game. It took me over a week of hard work. Now I could build something similar in a day using these tools. It is astonishing how robust and easy to use for quick design these tools are.

The average gamer is not some punk in the basement. It's everyone from 5-year olds to grandparents. Very few will ever step foot in a forum, do the research to find a mod, and most can't even be hassled to apply patches let alone the 5 step process to install a mod and check for compatibility between mods. The visibility of mods is rapidly dimishing in proportion to the growing gamer player base. While extremely vocal, often time the forumites are the smallest minority yet.

More and more games are coming out with little to no mod support period. The vast majority will only include something simple like a map editor, but no deep set of tools to retailor the engine to your whims. As long as players can make their own maps and maybe add a few cute features, we appear to be satisfied as long as we get patches and new features are promised.

All of these factors in my mind spell an end to modding as a driving requirement for games. Instead, all the great modders have realized they can just build their game using other tools and sell it for money. Using moddability as a requirement for longevity is a joke for the majority of games. Gamers move on within the month, and there is no revenue in mods, just a happier (and very small and select) forum fanbase.

There will still be a place for mods. Great mods still appear and shake up the world. See things like Portal: Prelude which shook the community. A recent mod Nehrim for Oblivion is gorgeous and adds so much to the game. Gamers continue to create patches for "unfinished" games like Vampires: The Masquerade, Knights of the Old Republic 2, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It is also still a hot bed for beginners to mess around and being adding new items and small tweaks to the content. However, as a driving force, as something that developers should strive to include, I see little merit anymore. There are better, more profitable ways for up and coming game developers to break into the market. There is higher visibility and more investors awaiting in the indie scene. And the innovation for the past year hasn't come from modders but from small independent developers making their own unique engines, game mechanics, and visuals. They didn't start with a foundation besides their ideas. Why burden them with learning the way your game did things when they can just make their own system?

Truly the only reason to have mod support is to satisfy the annoying group who keep complaining about not having enough control over their own game. And slowly they are getting drowned out in the noise.