The game Minecraft took in almost one quarter of a billion dollars in 2012? WTF?

The Game Room
61

Honestly, the best modding community in the world today is the Elder Scrolls gang, who started with Morrowind. The Elder Scrolls modders make their own tools and they didn’t even need to wait for the Skyrim Creation kit to come out before they’d modded their FO3 tools and started cranking out Skyrim stuff.

Modding itself is far more involved than it used to be, with the inclusion of 3d modelling, advanced lighting and scripting and more sophisticated and demanding audience. It’s more complicated today than it’s ever been and modders are rising to the challenge.

TL;DR - I’ll see your Counterstrike and raise you the entire DOTA genre which is poised to become an eSport empire.

62

The Bethesda community is still as strong as ever, I agree. It’s one of the few exceptions I think I pointed out upthread. They’ve always given modders the proper tools, and there are still enough people playing those games on PC that you have a modding community that’s the equal of the old modding communities. But the difference is that it’s now the exception, rather than the rule.

This may be a factor.

DOTA/MOBA games aren’t free mods, now, they’re commercial products. They began as a free mod in warcraft 3 back in like 2002, so I think that supports my position if anything. There are fewer people working on creating something new via modding, so while we’ve got DOTA as a commercialized version of an early-2000s mod, no one is working on the next DOTA.

63

No one’s making free Counterstrike mods any more either. <shrug>

64

Only there’s absolutely nothing about playing games that requires people to be even remotely aware of the modding community. I suspect that’s another issue - the size of the gaming ‘body’ has grown, but the number of people who care about mods probably hasn’t increased anywhere near proportionally. To use your analogy, it’s more like saying “There are more IBBs in baseball than there were 20 years ago.” and then acting dumbfounded when people just weren’t paying that much attention.

I was definitely not “involved” in it in the sense of “following” any particular mods, which is the sense I get when you say “involved”, even though, truthfully, very, very few people are “involved” in it in that way.

The closest I’ve ever been to “involved” in a mod was creating a mission for Freespace 2 (I won a T-shirt, go me) and screwing around with some custom AIs for Kohan 2 which never produced results I felt were worth keeping. Freespace 2 shipped with an excellent mission editor (Which, I should note, didn’t help the game sell well even though it’s popularly regarded as excellent), and my current space-sim-of-choice, Strike Suit Zero, is supposed to be shipping “mod tools” sometime in the not too far distant future, so that’s a break even from my perspective, and I’ve never encountered another RTS game since Kohan that even understood the IDEA of “more than one AI” nevermind allowing anyone to tune them, so that, to me, is more of an example of a one-off event than any sort of trend. So maybe the REAL answer is “I mostly play games that are less mainstream than you, so I don’t really have a finger on the pulse of how many big mods are coming out for the games that ‘everyone plays’.”

But when you get right down to, I think you’re right about there probably being a decrease in the number of “mods” There’s:

A) Very little financial incentive for a company to publish mod tools because it’s extra work to make their dev tools remotely ready for “end users” (even the Freespace 2 mission editor had bits where the ‘help’ for a given function said something like “If you need to know what this does, ask Dave.”) AND because making it easy for others to produce content for your game means that people are less likely to pay YOU to produce content for your game

AND

B) There’s now financial incentive for people who once-upon-a-time would have been modders to say “Why should I make content for someone else’s game when I can make my own game and sell it?” - it’s easier than ever for people to get into the development business, which in a way is far, FAR better than having these talented people stuck making new maps for some RTS.

So I guess at the end of the day, I don’t really think the decline in modding a problem.

65

I put autocorrect back on my editor, and this is the thanks I get. I still fat finger things, but now the computer just thinks it knows what I meant, and puts a word in there. There is no excuse. I should have proof-read my post, but holy cow, my post doesn’t even make sense!

Thank you for the great explanation!

66

As a huge fan of minecraft, to me, it’s about way more than just building or creating things. Most of the fun of the game for me comes from exploring new underground mines and caverns and strongholds and finding rare metals and diamonds and gems.

I love the enchantment system and building up experience to try and get the best enchantments possible to get awesome gear. I love playing with others, exploring and such together.

And yes, I do like building things too, but nothing all that monumental. I really love red stone circuitry and all the amazing things you can do with it. It’s basically like simple programming, sending on/off signals (or 1’s and 0’s if you prefer) to get stuff done with all kinds of devices. I’ve built elevators and trap doors and such, it’s just a lot of fun.

Mods open up even more amazing creativity which is essentially limitless!

So, there’s way more to minecraft than just building houses and such. I immensely enjoy just wandering around, getting lost, fighting monsters, gathering hard-to-find items, collecting experience for enchantments, brewing awesome potions, etc, etc, etc. It’s a game that just keeps getting better and better with time too. Each update adds more and keeps giving me a reason to come back and play.

And this is saying a LOT because above and beyond all other things, a great storyline is the MOST important quality in a game to me, and minecraft literally has none… and yet I still love it!

68

Can you really claim Black Mesa as a recent mod? Its a mod of a game that is over 15 years old and that has already been modded to hell and back?

70

Uh, good job with the thread necromancy?

Who CARES how old the game is or how many times it’s been modded? A recent mod is a mod that came out recently. I don’t think there’s a lot of room for argument in that definition.

Of course, it’s NOT recent by now, because you’ve picked a comment from early 2013 to address, so it’s now over a year old…

71

I’ve been a gamer for damn near as long as video games have existed and quite honestly I must have missed the fact that there were ten times as many significant, playable mods “back in the day.” Your experience and memory may not be the same as others’. Amazing but true.

72

I didn’t revive the thread, so you know what you can do with your snarky reply.

73

Yeah. Address it to the guy who asked me a question on a post over a year old…

74

I’ve commented on this game before (the XBox 360 version, specifically). To recap, I started out intrigued, then I blew many happy vacation hours on it, then the flaws started cropping up, then the annoyances started cropping up (water physics, impossibility of finding certain elements in quantity, struggles getting minecarts to work, animals getting in the way of everything), then the hair-tearing aggravations started cropping up (creepers, all the other enemies that could kill you and didn’t get scared off by light, losing all your stuff every time you died if you didn’t rush over and snap in up in like 90 seconds, the placement of saddles being completely a matter of DUMB STUPID BLIND BRAINDEAD LUCK, lava physics, trying to gather lava, trying to gather lava without being burned to death in 4 seconds, trying to gather enough lava to make that damn portal, trying to make lava go where I want, trying to do any goddam thing at flipping all with lava), and then I threw the game away after getting every achievement I could conceivably attain within my mortal life. Needless to say, I found it rather overrated.

In fairness, though, I feel compelled to reiterate that this was the XBox 360 version, which was missing a number of features, and of course was on a system that’s become synonymous with torturous difficulty. (Just to put in perspective, one of the biggest complaints about Otomedius is that it’s too easy.) I’ve seen quite a few videos of the PC version, which have all kinds of mods and new items and animals, and where the creator can even set the time of day or prevent certain creatures from appearing. There’s a lot to play with here, and a truly visionary creator can produce outright breathtaking works of art. Not just grand cities and Rube Goldberg-worthy machines, but engine exploits like the “cat fountain”, which, I’ll admit, I found absolutely adorable.

So no, the financial success of Minecraft isn’t due to some idiotic backlash against graphics (exactly how many other blocky-graphics games have become icons?). It’s just a huge, bright canvas that’s a ton of fun to play around in, and the sky’s the limit as to what you can create. It’s not limited by age or culture or creed. It’s something anyone can enjoy, which even I did for a while. And I’m seriously considering buying the correct version sometime, because I know how good it is.

Oh, one final thing: Make sure you know the difference between Creative and Survival. Creative is the REAL game, where you have a full toolshed to work with and you can let your imagination run wild. When you hear all the glowing reviews and breathless articles, this is what they’re talking about. This is what made Minecraft a hugely profitable phenomenon. Survival is an eternal nightmare where you’re constantly starving and brittle as glass and your have to work and slave to get the simplest tasks done and the most basic necessities require back-breaking labor and you have to turn the world upside down for certain resources and every second something can sneak up on you and kill you (creepers are the worst example but definitely not the only one) and you can lose two days of progress in an instant and every creature is either getting in your way or trying to chew your face off and you have to do 1,001 Lava Tricks just to get enough obsidian for that damn portal, never mind finding enough diamond to collect the stuff. Yeah, there are players who actually go for this stuff. Probably the same ones who complain about good graphics all the time.

75

Survival’s not that hard. Even on the 360.

76

Doom, Descent and many others didn’t come with tools, either. People reverse-engineered them, and only after that did the developers release the info needed to make them really effective.

As someone who once kept up with everything in the Doom directory on the Walnut Creek public FTP, dabbled in assorted things since then, and recently-ish made a major mutator that got “bought out” into base Red Orchestra 2, I’m a little familiar with what game modding looks like and I still don’t think it’s fair to say that modding is dead. It’s just changed form.

Content creation is now so easy that strapping yourself to a specific commercial game is more limiting than it is empowering. Game engines are typically so complicated these days that there’s not much extra step between learning to seriously mod something and just making standalone content entirely.

You can throw together something in a canned engine, have far more freedom doing it and deliver it to a lot more people, and do it all easier than modding up a game. You might even be able to make real money off of it, instead of being limited to things like the good old fraudster Duke3D map pack CDs.

I mean, I’ve recently bought two Game Maker games on Steam (Risk of Rain & LUFTRAUSERS) and an ascended Source mod (Insurgency). I’ve also downloaded a standalone UDK project (Renegade-X, which is awesome by the by) and let’s not even talk about the gazillions of Flash games out there. Kitbash game development is alive and well, it’s just called “indie” instead of “modding”.

Plus, there’s always nexusmods and the entire Minecraft rabbit hole.

77

Yeah, I’m a little baffled that people find Survival all that hard, even on the Hard setting. Protecting yourself from mobs takes all of the first seven minutes of the game, which is about as long as it takes to build a shelter. It takes some digging to find the key minerals, but you’re certain to find them if you just dig, and if you find an abandoned mine you’ll be rolling in the basics in no time.

Survival adds an element of planning and strategy to the game. It’s the only way I’ll play.