created. I think it’s a real shame that most UGC creation is on the edges of games, and there’s really no real way for studios to really engage with their community, except on a case by case basis, which means most of them put it in the ‘too hard’ basket. That’s why it’s all about accessibility for us.” Currently
mod.io supports more than 80 games,
including the likes of Mordhau, Space Engineers and SnowRunners. The fact that UGC for each one is accessible hassle-free regardless of platform is impressive, but next to the volume of titles supported by Steam’s Workshop, suggests perhaps that many more companies are hesitant of the service than have embraced it. “Modding is definitely growing year by year. It’s
a really interesting thing, though, because modding is very much a multiplier of success. It’s not necessarily something that will create success on its own, because you’ve got to have that passionate community that really wants to extend the game and personalise it in different ways. It’s never going to be something that fits every game because modding is really challenging to support. It lives completely outside of the realm of what a game developer is normally expected to do.” Reismanis admits that when you invite and
support fans to mod a game, you are relinquishing some control over it, which means having strong support and moderation systems in place to manage what UGC is put out. “One of the biggest barriers that studios face is that it’s just so hard to ship a game. ‘How do we do modding, where do
we start?’ And so we’re building Unity and Unreal plugins that just drop in and work, and can work on PC and cross-platform. We can take responsibility and really assist with moderation and community, as we’ve got a lot of expertise and experience doing that over a multi decade period. “Ultimately, it all ties into our belief that
modding makes amazing communities and leads to really emergent, incredible gameplay when enabled.” The challenge for Reismanis and the wider
mod.io team is to get that belief across, and of course provide the metrics and stories to back it up. “Making that more and more known to more of the industry is a really exciting challenge for us and we’re not going to really stop until we see modding as a bigger driver of success for more games, and something that studios start thinking about very early on in their development lifecycle, rather than seeing it as a value added at the end. So, it’s a bit of a shift, but it’s one that I would say is certainly accelerating.”
SnowRunner is apparently the most popular game on
mod.io. Take from that what you will
mod.io wants to make mods just as accessible to publishers as they have been for players
January 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 39
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