A portion of my last post on this blog briefly mentioned the modding community of PC games and how that affected the market. Writing that sparked my memory and I realised that if it weren’t for the modding community as a whole I probably would have no interest in pursuing game art as a career. So it seems fitting to me that I dedicate this blog post which will delve deeper into a certain aspect of Video Game history to modding communities.
To start with I feel I should mention that some of my favourite games of all times were originally created as mods. Specifically, Counterstrike Source, and Team Fortress 2. Counterstrike was a mod for Half life Deathmatch. It was picked up by valve and has been re-released and updated many times and an early version of the game (Counterstrike 1.6) is still the most widely played online shooter to date. Team fortress 2 (also made picked up by valve is a sequel for Team Fortress which was also a mod for Half Life Deathmatch.
One of my current most played games is a MOBA called League of Legends. So there isn’t any confusion as to what a MOBA is I should add that it stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, and takes elements from tower defence games. The reason that I mention this is that if it wasn’t for mods this entire genre of games would be nowhere near as popular.
The genre originated when one modder took inspiration from a game mode in Future Cop and made a the mod Aoen of Strife for Starcraft. Another modder then recreated this game mod in Warcraft 3 and called it Defence Against the Ancients. It wasn’t long after this mod gained popularity that commercial games were being released using the same gameplay format and thus a whole new genre was forever cemented into gaming history.
Valve have a long history of absorbing other developers (or modders) ideas and releasing them as full fledged games, this is by no means a bad thing as rather than stealing intellectual property the hire the creators of the original idea to develop the games. Just as before with Team Fortress 2, Valve took the mod Dota and released a sequel as a fully commercial game called Dota 2. I assume this was to directly compete with the massive success League of Legends is currently having in the eSports scene. They supported their release with international tournaments and massive prizes.
I feel like I should mention how supportive of the modding community the two companies I have mentioned (Valve and Blizzard) have been. Both these companies released tools for the users to use for modding. In fact Valve make the same editor they use to create games available for use by the public. They have previously listed user made mods for source games on steam itself. Recently they went one step further and released the Steam Workshop; a place where for user created content to be rated and shared for many games on steam that are not just their own including Skyrim and Goat Simulator.
Such a large company supporting user created content is quite a rare site to see these days. Many companies are completely shutting off the ability to make user created content because it conflicts with their unethical model for releasing DLC. It doesn't have to be that way, many great games have released very successful DLC while allowing user created content alongside it. The Steam Workshop is in my opinion a wonderful way of ensuring the age old PC tradition of modding stays alive and I am glad that it appears to be such a great success.
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