the
mod.io article
At what point when developing a game should you think about supporting mods and other forms of user generated content? Scott Reismanis, founder and CEO of
mod.io, doesn’t have the answer, but he can connect you with those that do – the people that make the magic happen. Regrettably, Richie Shoemaker can only connect words
T
hree of the four biggest titles on Steam right now, were, in their earliest incarnations, mods – fan-made games built atop the foundations of another. Riot’s most popular
games are directly derived from two of them. To suggest that mods are an afterthought or inconsequential to game industry success is a delusion. For it is mods, with their constant updates, lively communities and customisations, that were very much the original live service games. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that we might one day view mods collectively as the prototypical – and perhaps utopian – gaming metaverse, able to transpose and combine IPs across boundaries that publishers are averse to cross. Where else but in a mod can you pitch Star Wars and Star Trek ships against one another, or find the iconic weapons from Aliens fully realised in Doom? Crudely given form 20 years ago, these are the dreams of metaverse evangelists today. Also crudely realised 20 years ago was mod DB, one of the first
websites devoted to collecting, curating and archiving mods for popular and not-so-popular games. From unofficial patches that fixed games that their developers had moved on from, to character skins and full-blown total conversions that might render an underlying game unrecognisable, keeping up with developments in user generated content (UGC) was a challenge that a young Scott Reismanis sought to overcome. “It was so hard navigating through Planet Half-Life and all
the dominant gaming sites and modding communities were fragmented all over the place” he remembers. “So I decided I had to remedy that, selfishly, by creating a community where people could collaborate and share what they’re doing. And that’s really why mod DB was born, just to be a database of mods. Inevitably, as these things have a way of doing, the community took over and it’s been on a life of its own and just grew and grew and grew.” After later setting up the digital indie storefront Desura and indie
DB, Reismanis returned to mod curation by establishing
mod.io in 2017. This was during a time when mods were starting to become more mainstream on console, having long been the preserve of the PC gaming fraternity. Together with the growing demand for
36 | MCV/DEVELOP January 2022
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