Post by mut in Modding Incentive

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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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itch.io

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