Games Today Shut the Door to Tomorrow’s Devs | Hacker News Reader

Games Today Shut the Door to Tomorrow’s Devs

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This is one of the perennial complaints about games. Every generation of games development has its version of "back in my day mods were easier to make" complaint.

Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and getting all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.

Where most AAA game engines used to make modding easy but licensing to sell mods hard, there are now entire engines (Unity, Unreal) with fairly simple, linear (as opposed to exponential or worse) license systems that allow hobbyists to build with the same tools of AAA developers and license their work for resale, growing organically with their audience size rather than being constrained to artificial limits of steep license curves.

It's one of those cases where it's both better than its ever been and worse than it ever was, and you can write clickbait articles for both sides of that, but overall, unclouded by nostalgia glasses the answer is probably just that it's the same as it ever was.

And the games without mod tools are easier to mod than ever because almost everyone is using either unity or unreal, and modding those engines is well understood.

If you're testing just how fun a game is, it's easier to get someone to try a Warcraft 3 'map' than install a whole new game, with a new interface, new art, etc to get used to.

I think the distribution networks and art assets still make it more effective than unity for testing game concepts. And that's what leads to games like Battle Royale and DOTA.

>it's easier to get someone to try a Warcraft 3 'map' than install a whole new game

It's also safer. Running executables (with full access to your user account) from random people on the internet is the quickest way to get pwned. Games with built-in mod support often sandbox any code within the mod so that it doesn't have unrestricted access to your machine. (Any game with automatic mod downloading upon server join better be doing this at least.) So it's both easier and safer to try out games (er, mods/maps) on random people's suggestions. (Same goes for browser-based games, since browsers sandbox all code in web pages.)

Oh right, I forgot to mention Twine, Ink, et al. The web browser really is seeing some cool games work. Even things like WebVR and Babylon.JS allowing small devs to explore VR concepts in the browser.

Its just a sliding scale though isn't it? I mean it goes somehting like:

starting with most accessible:

Modders<->Unity Devs<->Unreal Devs<->Custom C++ engine devs

Maybe? I think the paths between such things are more maze-like and full of grues than a simple sliding scale. Though arguably even if it is "just" a sliding scale, the fact that there are more options on the scale between Modders and Custom C++ engine devs is still an interesting change over time. I remember when there was almost nothing but a impassable wall between Modders and Custom C++ engine devs.

Agree. It's a combination of faster hardware and more friendly software (unity etc). That's progress! Although some would not agree (see Steam and the fuss over the state of the store).

> Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and getting all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.

Minecraft doesn't have any significant modding support from the developer. Official 'mods' are mostly limited to textures / shaders. The real modding tools that exist for Minecraft were created by the community and largely exist because Java is comparatively easy to reverse engineer in addition to some 'off the record' style support of the mod lib authors by the game developers. The whole mod scene has gone through various phases of questionable legality and unknown future. The Minecraft mod scene exists largely in spite of the game developer, not due to it.

For what it's worth, I also consider the base "gameplay" pattern important, official "mod" tools: crafting, redstone, etc. The variety of things done with just those simple tools, no Java, rivals a lot of stuff done with "mods" to past games; don't discount it simply because it's done entirely within the ruleset of the "game" itself. Minecraft is this generation's ZZT.

I don't think Mojang ever tried to actively stop the mod community like, say, Rockstar did. I would say Minecraft does have modding support in the sense that the installation files are an open book, inviting unlimited modding opportunities for anyone who wants to tinker.

They never tried to stop it but they never fostered it either. It was just coincidentally easy to reverse engineer the code and install mods. But the interfaces were VERY brittle, and mods had very specific version requirements.

Official mod support (with an installer and an API) was on the dev roadmap but never materialized.

Don’t know about “open book” given Minecraft’s Java bytecode is obfuscated - mods rely on code deobfuscated by players.

The available tools for game development are better than ever and widely available. The problem is that users expect AAA title quality, and that's a big job.

If you want to develop inside an existing environment, there are the virtual worlds - Minecraft, SineSpace, High Fidelity, Sansar, and Second Life. Even 3DXchat, which is supposed to be porno but has enough building tools that people are using it for other things. SineSpace is very developer friendly right now. Few users, but nice tools.

That's what was so great about editors like Warcraft 3, you get the AAA feel for free.

That also conflicts with people's expectations of games to be constantly updated and patched. Valve added a built-in custom game creator for Dota 2, but game designers still run into issues since any breaking changes in Dota 2 can potentially break their games, and Valve doesn't want to maintain two separate copies of the game to appease custom game creators.

You dont want your users creating content IF that is your primary source of profit as a game studio. If your users can effectively create new items, new maps, DLC, new missions, new characters etc what do you sell to them after your initial release? The easier it is to create this new content (aka non expert) the more likely that the price of this content (even if there was a market) would basically be free. (discounting network and intellectual property effects)

Allow all of that except for creating new items/assets. Release DLC which when purchased lets you use its assets in your own levels. Then others who want to play them have to also purchase the DLC.

See the game Trials Fusion for an example of this, I think it worked well for them profits wise?

Sounds like Little Big Planet as well. The majority of content was user-created but they still sold content DLC which then allowed you to use those new items in your own levels.

You sell them quality. Mods are shit quality, across the board. They’re full of broken English, half baked assets, and tons of bugs. Sure, fun can be had, but when it comes to my wallet, I want quality attached to fun.

The better the "mod" tools the higher the quality of the modifications and additions. Also the simpler the game the easier it is to make such modifications. Many of the minecraft mods were vanilla level quality.

If that is the case, the the end goal should be a marketplace to sell mods, and the company can move up the food chain. Basically the sims works this way.

You have to be sarcastic. Thats just a nonsensical generalization. Far from all mods are broken shit just as far from all DLCs are polished. You have stuff like Enderal when it comes to mods and I hopefully dont have explain to you, how unpolished and simply broken many games are, let alone dlcs. There is a giant list of games which are only playable after years and years of community patches, made surprise surprise mainly by the modding community. But thats if modding is possible. If not you are left with the shitnugget you preordered.

Yes, there are good quality mods out there. But they sit on top of mountains of shit. You can’t point to the top of shit mountain and say “see, look at how good it is”

I can and i will if you say "across the board"

Your DLCs also expand the capabilities of the editors, because you need to add new functionality to program the levels hopefully (otherwise, you haven't really done much worth paying for).

Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne was an amazing hit, partly because it opened up the editor even more for content like DOTA.

Yes you can totally sell new versions if they expand the engine/editor in ways that allow for new games.

However you can think of it this way. The game shipped is a point in space. The possible mods to the game are nearby points in this gamespace. Given tools dictate the work involved to get to that new point in gamespace. The better the tools the larger that isosurface is for some given max amount of work. The problem for game studios is that the things they want to sell might exist within the space that is work path accessible to the mod community.

People who play with mods are a tiny-but-vocal minority. Most people just download the vanilla game and play with that. Even if the game supports Steam Workshop, most players won't even bother to look.

Enthusiasts are a pretty small segment of any customer base.

That depends on the effectiveness of the platform in integrating mods. DOTA was far more popular than normal Warcraft RTS games at its peak.

> If your users can effectively create new items, new maps, DLC, new missions, new characters etc what do you sell to them after your initial release?

You're discounting the value of good design and creator experience.

There might be a decreasing barrier to entry for creating more content for a game, but that doesn't mean everything will be of the same quality.

You sell them your brand and the quality behind that brand. This is arguably what is being sold for any product.

For games in particular, it's also not a new concept. Mods never really competed with expansions since the expansions promised a higher level of quality.

Today, you can look at games like Tabletop Simulator, Minecraft (to a degree), Mario Maker, or anything with Steam Workshop that also has DLC. The existence of usermade content is not really an obstacle for selling (well-made) DLC.

There was massive internet backlash toward it but I still truly think Valve's "paid mods" idea is the way forward for this. Back in the day, when Unity/Unreal/Godot weren't freely available for anyone to use, people would put a lot of their own personal time into making mods, without any expectation of pay. Now, even if the mod tools were there for modern games, why would anyone make a "total conversion" mod instead of just making the game themselves using free modern tools?

Creating incentives for game developers to add mod tools to their games by creating the incentive for potential mod-makers to make some money off their work seems like a solid strategy for me. (I think I heard a rumor somewhere that Valve is going to bring back the "paid mods" idea again soon, possibly in a retooled form.)

Yeah I think paid mods was off in execution not idea. Would love to see it come back.

The main thing that mods give developers is a distribution network and that is invaluable if you ask me. Getting someone to install your game is the biggest hurdle.

I disagree. As soon as free, small communities get monetized they soon become overrun by sharks and profiteering. They become hotspots for fraud, and troublemakers cause a nuisance to existing community-members. Sure there is some of that already, but not to the kind of scale that monetization inevitably brings.

Your other major problem is that much of the audience for mods are kids or teens who don't have a lot of money. Keeping modding free is what keeps content generation gated to those who intend to truly intend to better the community.

As an example, I now continually get fraud warnings on my Epic account, which I keep for UDK access, because Fortnite blew up. It's really annoying :(

Ahh, so that's what that is... I was wondering why I was getting so many 2fa alerts.

>Why would anyone make a "total conversion" mod instead of just making the game themselves using free modern tools?

A TC mod for a game gives you some distinct advantages, especially if distributed through the Steam Workshop:

1. One click installation - the Steam client takes care of everything for you.

2. Community forums and news feeds already set up - you can get instant feedback from players

3. Easier to get a foothold on someone's machine - it's easier to get someone to install your game knowing that it's a TC for a game they already have (so they may have some notion about the quality of the assets and engine) as opposed to trying to convince someone to install a completely new game.

I remember making a dota precursor game on Warcraft 3 after playing some tower defense games... I created waves of enemies spawning in opposite directions, but you had 2 teams trying to build towers. The problem I had was that once spawned, building lots of towers messed up the patching. I abandoned the game after only a couple if tests, but I think it has been original at the time.

On the top of my head, I can list Minecraft, Elder scrolls, Fallout, Factorio, Cities Skylines as modern games that have a vibrant modding community. Minecraft really helped me get a better programmer.

I strongly disagree with the point this article is trying to make, it feels like some kinds of proxy-gatekeeping (our games were so much better)

Bethesda (fallout, elder scrolls) is basically the only AAA studio that makes an effort.

I'm mostly saying that AAA games not having modding is just a big loss, especially given how this generation of games (Fortnite, Overwatch, League) are magnitudes bigger than anything before it.

Warcraft 3 modding is what got me interested in programming in the first place. I made a handful of somewhat popular custom maps, and having a forum where players could report bugs or suggestions gave me great insight into understanding the user perspective.

I hear the argument of this article and how important it was (being able to mod/participate in mods) but computers are also fading for gamers with the next generation.

The Kids I interact with are on tablets/phones, not the PCs we had that we could modify and upgrade and tweak as we saw fit.

Currently I feel like we're in a period of very locked in devices that stifle creativity by default. Even PC games are always online so you can't get all the content of the game, it has to be server-side unlocked or bought.

> Blizzard themself have no modding capabilities for World of Warcraft or Overwatch. League of Legends, Fortnite and PubG have no mod framework whatsoever, despite being originally inspired by a mod.

ugh. I think the key point the author is missing that those are all online-only studio-server games. I can't remember any of those ever being properly moddable.

What Doom, Quake, and WarCraft3 had in common that you a) had a singleplayer mode and b) more importantly could host your own (dedicated or not) server - so you weren't taking part in a persistent MMO world where you'd for example ruin the economy with your "unlimited gold" mod, but you were setting the rules in your game mode.

Then don't play today's games. They probably are all overly complicated for the experimentation someone would want to do. Use the older games that have well-developed tooling and open source engines and assets.

The most popular games aren't cutting edge graphics games anyway. Gameplay is beating pretty graphics in lots of ways.

And those games that don't provide modding tools? They'll go quicker out the door and will be less famous.

Nitpick: WoW allows add-ons which are user created in Lua.

Fair but those are more for display/frontend purposes. They shutdown custom servers pretty hard.

> However, this seems like a particularly shortsighted form of gatekeeping because it also cuts off a pipeline for young and inexperienced people to get into game design and programming. Riot and Blizzard have hired many of the Warcraft3 modders as full-time employees, but where will the next wave come from?

Is this even a problem? Are there game developer shortages?

It really does seem like the early to mid 2000s was the pinnacle of the mod scene.

It's not like the mod scene is dead. The big game mods have migrated to indie development through Unity - if somebody made Counter-Strike today, it would be a Unity game because the tools are so easy to use and productive compared to the old Hammer toolkit. And as for modding in general, you just need to look for the right games, where it's still thriving. Minecraft, FTL, Sins of a Solar Empire, Stellaris (and other Paradox games), Elder Scrolls all have varying degrees of active communities (some have aged less poorly, others are still alive and kicking - but all of them have fantastic mods that make it worth playing these games over and over). Even SoaSE, whose population has really dwindled, still has a handful of total conversion mods that are still in active development (one of which is arguably one of the best Star Trek mods out there for any game).

The industry has definitely changed, but I don't feel like there are less mods or less people interested in making mods than there used to be.

The latter-day Half-Life and early-to-mid Source engine mods... such a good time. People were cranking out all kinds of crazy stuff, pushing those engines to their limits and then some. Garry's Mod kept this going for awhile too, with people making crazier and crazier custom gamemodes and maps... man I miss those days, there was always cool new stuff to discover, communally online with others.

I'd recommend checking out any game developed by Paradox. You haven't seen fantastic mods until you've seen what people can do with Paradox games

For that matter, some games that Paradox only publishes (e.g. Cities: Skylines) also have fantastic modding support, though that's hit-and-miss compared to the games they develop in house.

I love Paradox. I happily fork over $10-20 a few times a year for new EU4 and Stellaris DLC. I feel like (1) the longevity of those games, (2) the ability for the developer to majorly rework systems far past release (see EU4 Art of War), and (3) modding ability, are all related.

Modding was my first introduction to programming. Specifically, starcraft 1 released in 1998. I was in elementary school at the time

Discovering the world of custom mods was amazing. It was basically the equivalent of google playstore + having your own mini android tools to build your own maps. There were so many unique genres birthed from that game. Tower defense originated as a starcraft 1 mod, and many other things such as temple runs (based off zergling runs). DoTA was based on the works of Aeon of Strife, which was considered the first MoBA. If you were to look at many of the indie games produced today, chances are there was a starcraft1 or warcraft3 map variant of it. These were the maps that became the most popular, the top 10%. The rest that didn't make it into mainstream modes are essentially the 90% of game apps that failed in the google playstore

Modding felt like programming. It was very much an object oriented programming paradigm. Units had attributes associated with them, to which you could modify globally. Things like their overall HP, armor, damage rating, etc. You could set observables, e.g. events, in designated areas in the map. Like if player X came to position Y, event Z happened.

I learned a lot by compiling my own modded versions of popular apps. I would install cheats inside of them, things like additional resources and units if you do a sequence of events (e.g. move unit to a special location). There wasn't really any validation in checking map authenticity, its very much like forking a git repo and publishing your own npm package.

Users who came to your map would have to download the latest version. Some would get skeptical in seeing new changes, wondering what promoted the new patch. This wouldn't work so well in popular maps, b/c the map publisher put a changelog on their website. But less popular ones it was much easier to get away with.

My modded map with the cheat installed would later get redistributed in the P2P network. People would play it. Sometimes if I promoted it enough by hosting the lobby, it would be the only seed available. Much like how torrenting works. Especially if that version added new features that people enjoyed.

Sometimes maps created get lost forever. Since everything was P2P, if no one had that map installed on their machine, and no one hosted that map anymore or played it, it was dead. Much like lost porn. This happened several times in which I wanted to find a map I played previously, but reinstalled my computer and could not find anymore lobbies to download the map anymore. Examples include some Lord of the Rings maps, Battle of Troy, Helms Deep, or things like Nexus Arenas

These days things are much different. Mirrors for hosting mods, either official (e.g. steam) or 3rdparty websites are widely available. There wasn't any youtube tutorials for making maps, you just had to read the help documents, and breakdown / understand other maps. Much like you do looking at opensource repos on github.

Modmaking was rewarding in its own right. You used the exact same AAA tools developers used, and when something finally clicked, you could build even cooler maps. Sometimes, you could install mods into your editor. Things like adding text colors to your units is one of many examples. Its kind of like if you installed a plugin extension with visualstudio code.

I don't know how this compares anymore to kids learning how to make mods in Roblox, GTA5 mods, minecraft, etc. Its probably not as complicated as it used to be, since youtube has so many tutorials out there. The real challenge back then was figuring everything out on your own and/or finding a reputable map mentor to help you out. IRC was a whole another thing I was introduced to in starcraft1 / warcraft3 days. The beauty of this back then was that it was the first of its kind, this custom modmaking scene for RTS based games.

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