More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Negative time, many games you know and love began as mods of other games.
Ya’ll talking about modded games, and no one mentioned Fallout London.
The developers got tired of waiting for Fallout 5 and made it themselves.
Counter Strike, Warcraft 3 DotA, ARMA 3 PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Momentum Mod, … All of these were mods that became so big they became their own games.
If you’re strictly talking about platforms though, you need support from the original developers,or the source must be easily editable (like the minecraft java edition). At that point it becomes pretty common for huge mods to be made which eventually end up managing themselves. The problem is that you need a lot of money to actually make new feeling games. And developers can’t easily ask for money for mods, so development time is quite limited.
I am talking even lower. Like a made for modding framework that is totally open source. And yeah, that means games will end up with a somewhat common look and feel. But a lot of games end up that way anyway after mods. I am not sure that players need tons of unique games. I think they want games that are comfortable and replayable. In many cases they just want to hang out with friends, and the game itself is almost a pretext. Fortnight is actually a decent example of that. It leaned into that with lots of events that weren’t really much more than window dressing. But if it is completely opensource, you can end up with a ton of flavors to try and a lower learning curve for each.
Think you just described a game engine like Godot or Armory.
Ultimately that’s what you are describing there with such a free-form framework. The tools to make anything.
Even at a higher level engines like RPG maker and twine exist within genres.
And that isn’t a mod, so much as a game.
But going back to mods…
And why should that end up with a common look and feel? People have been modding the look and feel of games since the 90s.
Credentials: I made mods and maps in the 90s and commercial games in the 2000s.
Well, if you lower the barrier to entry. More people are likely to use the stock offerings. But that isn’t really a plus. Ideally the games would be visually different. But if you have a simple mechanic like inventory, it could and should generally be similar to others, unless that is what is supposed to be different about your game. W, a, s, d at least is pretty standard now. But it wasn’t always. I have noticed games solving the same problems as many other games, but doing it much worse. And clearly not by intention to be different, just because that wasn’t thier focus. So for those cases, it would improve those games.
Factorio was created because Kovorax didn’t get a job at Minecraft…
IC2 modpack was a vibe.
Were you playing games through the late 90s and early 00s, by any chance? Because we’ve been here before. At least three of the most-played games on Steam right now came from mods.
Didnt the whole moba genre start as mod?
The third-most populated game on Steam right now is Dota 2. Dota 1 is a mod. Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. PUBG came from the designer of a Battle Royale mod for Arma.
And Auto Chess genre came from a custom game in Dota 2
Is LoL still the most popular game in the world?
Based off Dota
Almost certainly not, but it’s probably not far down the list.
Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod.
And Half-Life was essentially a Quake mod. (More extensive than most mods, since the developers were able to modify the Quake source code, but a mod nevertheless.)
No, that’s too much of a stretch. Half-Life is it’s own game, they licensed and then modified Quake’s engine. That’d be like calling Satisfactory a mod of Fortnite.
Half-Life is it’s own game,
Yes, as is Counter-Strike.
modified Quake’s engine.
Yes, mod is short for modification.
The distinction you’re drawing seems pretty arbitrary to me. Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding. They were more closely tied to the original game’s internals, and they were harder to make, but they were still mods. Even today, it’s not uncommon for mods to add features to or change behavior in an engine, via loaders or DLLs.
I suppose it’s a matter of one’s perspective.
Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding.
Yes they did. id Software, Valve and 3D Realms included their SDKs on the disk. All the way back in the 90’s they gave players the same tools they used to build the game. Any game that descends from Doom, all the way into the Source engine, store their assets in .wad files. We were replacing imps with Simpsons characters and titty chicks back when Clinton was president.
Now, the distinction between a game and a mod, I don’t buy the standard to be it’s own game as “started from scratch.”
Valve licensed the Quake engine from id Software. They changed it so much that the GoldSrc engine is considered it’s own thing; anything from skeletal animations to weapon reloading. They hired a novelist to write the story, they generated a ton of their own textures, models, sound effects and music.
Compare that to the original Counter Strike which was a pack of maps and some logic layered over Half-Life’s deathmatch mode.
Standalone product? Buy and run with no other dependencies? Game.
Officially released product from the same developer and/or publisher and/or rights holder that requires owning the original to function? Expansion pack.
Officially released product from the same publisher/developer/rights holder that does not require owning the original to function? Sequel.
Unofficially released product often a fan work that requires a copy of the original game to function? Mod.
I didn’t have to buy Quake to run my copy of Half-Life GOTY edition back in 1999. Though it came with a copy of TFC, which I think is technically an expansion pack as it required Half-Life to function but was officially released as a showcase of those modding tools I talked about in the beginning.
id Software, Valve and 3D Realms included their SDKs on the disk. All the way back in the 90’s they gave players the same tools they used to build the game. Any game that descends from Doom, all the way into the Source engine, store their assets in .wad files.
Those were not the first modded games.
In any case, you’ve already made it clear that you disagree. That’s fine, but it doesn’t make your view the defining one.
Mods are developed by fans in their free time, like the original Counter-Strike. To play it you had to own the original game and could get the mod for free. In contrast games like Half-Life are developed by a company with full-time employees, and sold for money.
Of course Counter-Strike hasn’t been a mod for a long time now. Valve took it over and turned it into a full game.
Started as Warcraft 3 custom maps before Dota 1.
I did in fact play games then. But back then, modded games weren’t anywhere near as common as they are now. And the games that were modded to make new great games were great to begin with.
Now adays we seem to start from trash and use mods to make it playable. Soo, do we need the trash?Roblox gets mods and UGC because people wanted to be there to begin with. Mostly children, but still people. I don’t know how to make an apples to apples comparison about how prevalent modding was back then, because there are just way more games out today in general; but there were still tons of mods. Elder Scrolls and the mod community have always been intertwined, and once again, people like what’s there in the first place. Even with the reputation of Elder Scrolls being a game you install mods on, it’s only something like 10% of players that ever install them. I have never modded Elder Scrolls.
In fact Morrowind (arguably Bethesda’s best game) is still getting mods made for it over 24 years later. It’s biggest mod, Project Tamriel/Tamriel Rebuilt, is still getting made and worked on, and just had a major update last April.
I wonder if there are metrics on % of players using mods across lots of games to see if there are patterns.
It’s been happening for years, almost decades at this point. In fact, I’d be willing to say that at least 50% of most games ever made were made by someone who used to mod other games for fun.
Most recently there’s been Black Mesa, which is a fan remake of Half-Life in Half-Life 2’s Source engine.
There’s also The Forgotten City, which was actually a Skyrim mod first and was so popular the mod makers were approached by Microsoft to make their own game.
Most Source engine games are actually mods of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod.
Decades.
Team Fortress started as a mod for Quake 1(30 years ago)Red Orchestra was the winner of the Make Something Unreal contest that Epic Games held over 20 years ago.
Famously, League of Legends and DOTA started as a custom map for Warcraft 3(Defense of the Ancients) and apparently Activision/Blizzard missed that window so much that they are a footnote in the genre they fucking started.
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to mod quake into dwarf fortress until I reread your comment.
Battlefield 2 was at least partly made by the team who made Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942
Also Phoenix Point, made by the team behind The Long War mods for XCOM.
I’m not exactly sure if this is what you mean, but I have a couple examples of fantastic community powered fan games that arguably eclipse their inspiration.
Pokemon Infinite Fusion: fan powered remake of Pokemon Fire Red that incorporates a fusion mechanic and has something like 600,000 high quality fan created sprites. They’re now working on a version for Pokemon Emerald
Clone Hero: fan made guitar hero/rockband clone with support for tons of peripherals including drums and vocals, with a huge library of fan generated songs.
I’d say maybe over 20 years ago until it starts?
The existence of engines like Unity and Unreal blurs this a bit. You used to see more full-conversion mods for games that make them into something else, because the engine was the hard part. Now that they’re available on very permissive terms, most hobbyist game devs will genuinely make a full game from an empty kit, and release it without players needing to mod a game like Half-Life or Quake.
But, having full ownership of that environment naturally means a lot of creators will want something back for their work. They have no choice but to shrug and accept it’s a free fan project when it’s built off a $60 game, but the story is different when that chain is gone. So most of this trend takes the form of indie game development.
Some have already tried that. There are some games where there’s basically zero base game and the devs want the players to fill in the content. Since such games start out with nothing, no one makes mods for them, and so the games die in obscurity. Ever hear of S&box?
That said, the people behind RPGMaker have a lot of this covered. They provide a good stock of assets to let people build stuff out of the box. This lets people create content quick, which eventually brings in the people that know what they’re doing, which results in good stuff.
I remember that Microsoft “sandbox” dev environment. That went nowhere.
Simulation games lean into this. E.g. Assetto Corsa’s base content is kinda meh, but there are thousands of mods for it, and it’s still the most popular sim racing game over ten years after release (helped by deep tinkering like graphics adjustment and weather modification).
Afaik BeamNG allows creating scenarios for challenges by programming widgets in Lua.
I was thinking more like RPGMaker. Some open source engine or what not that anyone can contribute to and read the code of that supports the easy building of games. AI can help with the graphics that most people good and design aren’t good at.
Honestly, this is how I wish more of my favorite IPs would go. Elder scrolls and fallout especially, Bethesda couldn’t write a story for a bad porno, let alone compete with some of the story mods in Fallout 4 and skyrim. Just streamline the developer tools into an easy to access plug and play system for mods and quit trying to sell us a $40 knock off of an existing mod on nexus.
So like itch.io?
No, not a platform to sell games. There are plenty of those.
I mean not super far away from what Sandbox seems to be trying to do, but I haven’t really looked into it so I don’t know for sure
Company-made games and standalone games aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Its a different type of project than modding/creating for games like Half Life, Gmod, Minecraft, Roblox, or VRChat. Making games within other games limits what you can do, because you have no control over the engine, and said engine is normally focused on an specific “base” mechanics set. For example, in Gmod, this is an FPS game. Modders can change this gameplay, but the further you push away from it, the less work is done for you, and the more you’re fighting the existing game. At a certain point, you may as well just make a game rather than a mod.
Sure, but the engine. My understanding is that even the game companies often license something like unreal engine or what not. Those cost money. How long berfore modders create their own engines for the various common game mechanics that are very mod friendly?
There are free engines available, and many of the paid ones have cheap or free tiers available for smaller projects. Also, if you want to actually publish your mod, there are likely to be a bunch of costs, like buying licences to use copyrighted characters, settings, ect. Even more so if you want to publish your mod as a standalone product, where you need to buy a licence to resell the entire original game.
That said, prehaps it would help to think of the game engine as a foundation, and the games as a completed house. If you want to make something, you can look at existing houses and imagine putting an extention on, or a new coat of paint. If the house is particularly well contructed, maybe its even easy to do. Still, at a certain point, theres no more you can add or change without it being easier to tear everything down and start from the foundation, or entirely from scratch. Its not a limitation of the design of the house, its just an intrinsic fact when you’re working by building off someone else’s completed work.
Now, if we start from the foundation (engine) instead we have less to start with, meaning its going to be a lot more work than doing minor changes, but the hardest part is still already done for us. This is what most people do when making games. Its far more flexable than modding, esspecially because you have a selection of engines available at different prices, with different strengths, weaknesses and specializations. GameMaker for simple 2D games, RPGMaker for making jrpgs, Unreal for 3D action games, ect.
Finally, you could skip both these options, and design and build everything from scatch. Its the option that gives you most freedom by far, but its generally not worth it unless you’re making something thats very small, that is so unique that nothing else will work, or that you’re dedicated and what a perfect fit for.
I think you are still thinking from a perspective of making money. I am thinking more like opensource software. A free engine or engines that handle generic stuff. Then some plugins for common features on top. After that, opensource licensced graphics for tons of things like lights, tables chairs… with associated sounds for moving or breaking. A total noob, could use AI to slap together a concept. Then they or others could tune it if the concept seems fun.
And of course at any point someone can fork it and go in their own direction. Essentially community, not “developer” driven games.So, basically you’re describing open source, public domain game development (rather than just an open source engine like Godot) by the sound of it. This does happen, games like Luanti or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but very rarely. Unlike mods, which tend to be small, quick-and-dirty projects, game development is usually much larger in scope and more difficult. It’s normal for the process to take years of work from a collective of skilled developers and artists. That amount of work is usually just too much for someone to willingly give away for free.
Engines cost money for a reason. It means you get the tools while someone else spends the significant resources to develop and maintain it. There are FOSS engines available, but those aren’t as developed or widespread.
Exactly, but that is what I am pondering. How long until those engines get easy enough to maintain that they really take off. Software coding tools are starting to take off. If constrainable by verification test, those tools can do a lot. I don’t know what it takes to maintain a FOSS engine from experience, but I can imageing that a lot of the effort goes into supporting different hardware and OS changes. That is the kind of thing that software coding tools should be able to greatly reduce the effort of. Usually such engines have large quantities of tests for both functionality and performance verification. So you can set the tool to add support for a new peice of hardware, and instruct it to test both that and others, than iterate u til it gets it right. Right now, I think the costs for that are still too high. But the day is probably coming when those costs get low enough, and the coding tools good enough to greatly reduce the maintenance aspect of engines. Since that is the boring part of FOSS, that could drive an explosion in that area.
More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods.
But back then, modded games weren’t anywhere near as common as they are now.
What are you talking about? What new games with proper modding tools are there? Nobody wants to mod Starfield compared to Skyrim, Most of you probably don’t even know that there are modding tools out for Doom Eternal. CS server mods were effectively neutered by CS2’s matchmaking and skins store. There’s gooner mods for Capcom games and VR plugins I guess. Indie game engines ate the modding community’s lunch.
Well, recently I have played rimworld, 7 days to die, satisfactory, raft, and subnautica. They all have mods. I can’t recall the last game I played that didn’t. Now some of those didn’t suck on thier own, but seems like a lot do.
That’s fair. I am vaguely aware that sim and sandbox games do tend to have mod support. For reference, with a quick search into the 71 games mentioned in the 2025 Game Awards Show, ~5-10 come with significant mod support.
Right, so now if some common tools get pulled together by a few people, such that the base game itself is essentially opensource, that could make creating a game is more like modding. And the result would be free. It would also be forkable, and of course easily moddable since it is all open source. That could lead to community created games. No more complaining the devs should do XYZ. Just mod it. I mean some people will always prefer to complain, but lowering the barrier to entry could open the way for enthusiasts to make their own games with less effort. And with AI getting half decent a coding, someone will probably write an agent to lower the barrier even more, especially for the QOL tweaks that current mods often cover.
Well, I started playing Skyrim about 3 years ago, and I now have over 200 mods. It’s almost as high quality graphics and sound as modern games, plus I have a huge choice of scenarios I can install. Wild stuff.
Cyberpunk 2077 might be next for me, unless I decide to play skyblivion!
