Post by mut in Modding Incentive

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I am not suggesting profitable ways of modding games, even less suggesting itch.io to have specific mechanisms in place to help moddable games profit (eg.: steam marketplace). I think it is up to the game developers to make this choice and balance out if it's worth it or not.

The specific case where I though about this being a possible feature was when playing a small broken free game (which I could say amount for most of itch's library), that I felt compelled to "fix", and though itch could have interesting ways of incentivizing that behaviour, instead of me having to DM the game's author. It's a very tough conversation to have, and I think with certain incentives, itch can "educate" people to even start thinking of the possibility of opening up their free broken games they expect nothing with. Would be almost like promoting a game specific "licensing" idea and helping users out with it, by say, asking some additional questions about how you think your game can be modded/shared. (kind of like the CC questionaire you answer to know the best CC license to choose for your assets)

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Halloween Astronaut4 years ago(+1)

I think it is up to the game developers to make this choice and balance out if it's worth it or not.

I guess that is right, the developers should make a decision whether they want to invest in creating modding tools for their projects and keep it organized, therefore, it is up to developers in each case. By the way, even with GNU license, I believe it is fair to e-mail the original developer and establish basic agreement over any actions to be taken on own behalf upon their work. Communication, in general, is recommendable.

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mut4 years ago

Hmmmm, idk, I don't usually call the developers of whatever new library I am working on and need fixing for permission to do so, there are very streamlined internal ways of doing that. And that's a bit of the beauty of the git ecossystem, and what I wanted to see in some extent in games (especially small and broken ones), it's not about all games being "forkable" or moddable, but again, for the developer to have the option to think about it. Just having a checkbox to add the game repository would already show that itch cares about this, and might make developers that haven't even thought about the possibility of open sourcing their games of doing so, or even reminding a developer that has this in mind, but forgets to add the github link on the game's description. So once again I'll say, it's not about having a beautiful modding ecossystem with a systemwide API with in app purchases and profits to the modders, it's about making the conversation more open, just incentivizing game developers to think about modding in a more loose sense (wow, I can just add my repository here and there might come a day someone plays this and report a bug or even makes upgrades?)

Idk, I can't really see any real drawbacks on this incentive other than additional work for itch.io developers, and talking around it surely is making me believe even more in this.

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Halloween Astronaut4 years ago

Could you streamline your proposal for the itch in two very brief sentences?

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mut4 years ago(+1)

There are 2 parts to it: incentivizing developers to make their games "moddable" and incentivizing players to become modders. So I'll do one sentence each.

Developers: Having a clear choice of sharing the game source code and/or modding tools on the game submission page, and some feature to receive proper attribution (I like the simplicity of something like Creative Commons, take a look at that experience).

Players/Modders: Having a clear way of knowing whether the developer of a game is open to their game being modded and a streamlined way of making, publishing and attributing mods.

Note that when I say mods, again, it doesn't need to be the steam workshop experience, it can be as " simple" as forking the source code and making a modification.

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Yal4 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

There's already a dedicated "source code" file type when submitting files to a project, so the "developer" side of things is essentially already covered. License information can be added through Dashboard --> Project page --> Metadata tab --> Release Info sidebar menu item. Not the most obvious place to look, but it's there, and it's displayed on the project page for players/modders/consumers if set.

For player/modders, though, there currently doesn't appear to be a way to filter search results by license (need to manually check the page). Only thing I could find is an "Open Source" tag. However, "Game Mods" is one of the categories you can upload a project as (there's currently 909 results at the time of writing), so I'd say there's already a streamlined way of making, publishing and attributing them...

I suppose your suggestion boils down to "make the things that already exist easier to find, and add an official tool to mark your project as modding-friendly"?

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mut4 years ago

I only actually knew about the "source code" file type, so thanks a lot for this info. I loved that the license information actually gives a brief description for each license and helps out choosing them, and I think that is basically my point, I only found out about this stuff after posting in the forums about it.

What I wish is that it was more incentivized in some way, even just sharing the source code as a file is a weird choice, when most likely the source code is already being hosted somewhere and could be easier to update. I see how it being already used by some people (and hopefully I'll start doing it myself now) but I think it should be more explicit to users, I can't even agree it's a streamlined process now, it's a bunch of different hidden processes.

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