I don’t get ballooning mod teams. I mean, at that point why not ship a standalone game? Last time this happened it was called The Witcher and I hear that did alright.
They do eventually that’s how we got most of our legendary studios and genres, but modding is low risk and cuts a lot faff. It also gives you a massive boost in publicity without spending on marketing.
Sure.
Again, people seem to be reading this as saying “don’t mod, develop full games”. Not what it says. I’m saying “if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead”.
In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it’s worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don’t like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.
Last time a ballooning mod team released a mod was Fallout: London and that also did alright…
Does anyone get paid anything? Or potentially just the game makers capitalising on the success of the mod?
bethesda taught us a very important lesson a while ago - if your game isn’t good, then the modders won’t bother. Skyrim despite its flaws is a good game, and has mods to show for it, Starfield despite its budget is pretty bad, and after the initial hype most ambitious mod projects were cancelled.
because of that i don’t think there’s any neferious plot behind the game makers celebrating their modding community, and the modding community certainly isn’t getting forced to work without pay - they’re passionate about the game and want to make something of their own within it, and honestly that builds a good portfolio for future use too
