How the rise of the modding community is about to change the industry forever
Modding is an odd concept. A subset of gamers devoting all their free time to adding content, improving issues or even dramatically overhauling their favourite games, often putting hundreds upon thousands of hours into their creations without expecting a single penny for the hard work. It defies the capitalist heart of the industry that such passion, dedication and – in many cases – success should lack any compensation. Until recently, that is. Modding has always been a significant part of gaming, often unknowingly altering the direction that the industry might travel in and the way games are made and played, yet now – more than ever before – modding has become popular. But why? What has changed to empower such determined communities?
“I think it’s easier nowadays, especially with Steam Workshop where you have a centralised way of sharing the mods,” claims Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of Cities: Skylines developer Colossal Order. An obvious answer, perhaps, but very true with the advent of Valve’s Steam Workshop – an integrated system of sharing your mods. “I think it is making modding easier since it becomes easier for all the players to find the mods,” adds Hallikainen, “and this is definitely something that is making modding more popular in my opinion. I think it’s really great to see that we now have a way for the majority of the players to easily see what can be possible and then they can get inspired and maybe get into modding themselves as well.” Ordinarily modding was le to the hardcore, to those gamers willing to put in the extra time finding and downloading different tools, altering INI files and debugging everything when it all went wrong. It stands to reason, then, that a system that pushes mods to the forefront of every gamer and makes it easy to add or remove the creations of others, should make modding more important.
“I got into modding when I actually wanted to change a mod I was using,” says Emmi Junkkari, better known as Skyrim modder Elianora. “I think it was a house mod too, it needed a few more mannequins and some clutter. I had played the game for a thousand hours – with mods, too – and the Skyrim modding scene was really starting to get into speed.” Bethesda’s Skyrim has become a haven for the modding community in recent years as it enables fans to open up and customise the already rich world and improve upon it tenfold, providing new content, changing the way it plays and even how it looks. Over the years since its release we’ve seen everything from complete graphical overhauls to swapping out the fearsome dragons for surprisingly creepy flying Thomas the Tank Engines.
More recent examples come in the likes of Cities: Skylines or Grand Theft Auto V; the latter was always going to find popularity even a er the many months of delays that the PC release had suffered, but it’s a series with a rich heritage of modding all the same. With Cities: Skylines, however, it was practically a selling point, a focused feature for the game that was even used as a bullet point in the game’s trailers. The developer’s first game, Cities In Motion, released in 2011 to a surprising amount of success, a fact – says Hallikainen – that is owed entirely to the modding community’s ability to open the game up. “Well, they broke it apart,” laughs Hallikainen. “It was so easy for them to modify the game because we didn’t have the resources – or we didn’t even realise – to kind of protect the game against people wanting to mod it and get to the engine.” The developer quickly realised the game’s success was borne out of the passionate community keen to tweak and improve it to their liking, and its follow up sequel would aim to do the same. “In Cities In Motion 2 we tried to make it so that it was easy to mod, but we failed miserably, I have to say,” claims Hallikainen. Building the game in the Unity Engine meant it was more closed than Colossal Order had intended, and modders just couldn’t work with it; cut to Cities: Skylines, a game also made in Unity but with a whole new in-game asset editor that allows players to import their own 3D models. The decision was made to make Cities: Skylines as moddable as possible, and by advertising that as a key feature it quickly took off – selling well over one million copies during its launch window and already seeing well over 40,000 different mods.
But was the game a success because of its moddability? Or was it simply the demand from scorned SimCity fans hoping to be satiated after EA’s latest was released? “I think that’s definitely a part of it,” says Hallikainen of the game’s mod-driven popularity. “I think it speaks to how open we are to the community. With Cities: Skylines we achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve with it, to make an open game for people to not only create their own city with the tools they have but also utilise the modding community. And that doesn’t mean we have to allow modding because we have a broken game; there is some criticism that developers rely on modders to fix their game. That’s not the point. I think it’s enriching. It’s something that brings more to the game.”
As more and more developers realise the supplementing capabilities of mods – thanks in large part to the immediacy and ease of use that comes with Steam Workshop – the time that players are willing to devote to a single game increases. Fabio Emerick, another Skyrim modder who goes by the username Anamorfus, admits that it’s the valueadded nature of mods that keeps games popular long after their traditional life cycle has passed. “The players – myself included – want bigger games,” he says, “games with countless hours, giant maps, big interesting quests, better graphics on the PC platform. Skyrim has an end, there is a total amount of quests in the game that is possible to finish, but then a modder comes and puts in an entire new world to explore with quests and top quality mod production; it puts a smile on the players’ faces because they are able to explore more content in the game they love.”
Developers are always looking for ways to keep players involved with their games for as long as possible. Gradually evolving games – with feedback from the fanbase – is the new go-to fad when it comes to game development these days, and the more input these players have the more willing they are to keep playing and trying out new, updated features. Modding is a clear extension of that; modders will put hours into a creation, and once it’s done they’ll spread the word, drawing in new players courtesy of the content they’ve made for free. Yet with the rising popularity of modding a new dynamic has risen. Bethesda was at the forefront of a controversy recently, one that divided the usually collaborative modding community in half. In an unexpected move alongside Valve, Bethesda enabled an option for paid mods – a system that utilised Steam Workshop to allow modders to sell their creations, with a cut going
to both Bethesda and Valve.
That split, however, is rather neatly segregated between content creators and content users. The former, having put in the hours of work, saw a benefit to being rewarded financially for their efforts. The latter, who have for years accepted mods as free extras to their games, insisted the status quo should remain. “I don’t want to make money by modding,” says Elianora, “I even feel kind of awkward receiving donations but I can totally see how someone would want to make this a career. Doing something you love, all day, every day and getting paid for it? I don’t see how that cannot be. If I make paintings in my free time, should I not be allowed to sell them for pocket money?” But she even admits there are a lot of grey areas that need to be solved before such a system could work. “As I know how much work mods can be and how much money some so ware and modding assets can cost, I’m all for paid mods, but if and only if it is implemented properly. A curated Workshop, proper moderation of content, a possibility for other content creators to check if their work is used against permissions without buying the mod, and some kind of proper buyer protection... then I would be okay with it.”
Taking the concept of a career modder to the next level is Bryan Shannon, a former Maxis employee who – having been made redundant after the SimCity developer was closed – has made a name (and an income) from creating mods for Cities: Skylines. With the launch of the game Shannon set up a Patreon page, hoping to earn a little extra on the side while he continued looking for work. His proven experience at Maxis meant the Patreon ballooned however, and now he’s currently earning over $600 for every single creation for Cities: Skylines he makes.
“As soon as I learned that you could create mods for Cities: Skylines I was almost like, ‘Okay – can I monetise this?’” says Shannon. “Though that wasn’t really the thought; it was more ‘How can I continue to keep doing this, can I sustain myself doing this and can I even create a job doing this?’ That was my ultimate goal, doing what I love to do. I think that was the key inspiration moment. Once I got set up on Patreon, though, my milestone goals were so small because I honestly did not anticipate hitting even the first one, at all.” Now he’s able to design and release 3D models of buildings for players to use in Cities: Skylines, and is currently earning enough to postpone the job search and concentrate on this as a living.
“When I was working at Maxis, the money just came from some imaginary place,” he adds, “I get a paycheque at the end of the month and accept this life, whereas with Patreon every single dollar has to come from one individual person. It’s super rewarding, and that’s kind of the Patreon mentality.”
Even with his success, however, Shannon knows his situation – at the moment – is fairly unique. Bethesda ultimately removed its option for paid mods, admitting it was ill-conceived. Valve responded too, claiming it is something that it would like to approach again but that there are too many questions that need answering. And so for now modding will remain the realm of those willing to do so for free, but a change is coming. “When Valve had mentioned that there were going to be paid mods, I wondered... ‘Did I create a monster?’” Shannon tells us. “That was not what I wanted. I actually really enjoy the donate system, and for what it’s worth I wish that when Valve comes out and releases their version of it I hope that’ll be what it ends up being, a donation style thing where it’s all integrated into your Steam wallet or something like that. We’ll see how that goes.”
But there are far bigger problems that need to be resolved before the questions surrounding consumer responsibility and content creator protection are even asked. All the modders we spoke to had concerns over Steam Workshop. As a tool for the user it is heavily praised, and a great thing for enabling gamer accessibility to mods, but it is not a simple system to use. “We didn’t consider having over 40,000 mods ever,” claims Hallikainen of Cities: Skylines’ huge collection of mods. “I think that what needs to be looked into is how we handle this amount of mods, basically just tagging the mods and trying to make it easier for people to use. We have added more tags but Steam Workshop is something that I think can be improved a little bit further.” As much as Steam Workshop surfaces great content, it is still a struggle organising the sheer volume of many games’ mods.
There are further problems on the creation side of things, too, as Shannon explains. “Let’s say I make a firehouse and I forgot to put a texture on the door, if I want to change that, in order for me to do it is a very hard runaround. It’s totally fine when you’re doing your first submission, but you’ve got to get it right the first time or you’ve got a lot of editing to do.” Elianora adds to the criticisms, too: “Oh man, I could rant about Steam Workshop all day. I think it helped bring mod awareness to a bigger audience, and made the modding world much more approachable, but as a modding platform, it is... garbage.” She adds that numerous changes need to be implemented, especially if paid mods are to ever take off . Elements such as version control, compatibility information and even the issue of Steam’s forced updates all need to be resolved.
“If an author removes their work from the Workshop, it gives a tiny warning and then deletes the mod from people’s games, causing save game issues and lost inventory,” she explains. “Imagine all your precious treasures and loot stuff ed in a player home and then losing that mod from your load order and save game. A bad update can ruin games as well and there’s no way to stop the updates.” The ball is, as ever, in Valve’s court. While its stranglehold on the PC market remains, it’s up to the Steam developer to first ensure its Workshop – a system that integral to PC games and modding – is sufficient to handle this influx of modders and mod fans. As it stands, the success of the modding community is being held back by a multitude of barriers. Something has to change; we only hope Valve is up to the task.