#modsupport

Today, @Cambo is taking a break from writing blogs but we won’t leave you guys hanging. Better yet, we had @Inoritewtf write one! Read on to see why we are all about supporting the modding community.

I don’t just want to make a “better Minecraft.”  While Minecraft was and still is incredibly important to our culture, it is so in perhaps not the way many would expect.  While the title has proved its longevity and arguably, left a tremendous legacy in the industry, the channel with which it has established its success is one that is perhaps the most seriously neglected by developers - as a platform for development by the modding community.  

The fact is that the prevalence of vanilla Minecraft has dwindled as derivative mods have come to dominate the indie scene, the latter of which being responsible for generating hundreds of thousands of hours of play above and beyond the vanilla version alone.  The “slow” development of vanilla and ability for modders to decompile its foundations has left a space that almost any aspiring and ambitious developer can fill.  Given this progression, the natural question is why the developers haven’t formally recognized the deeper implications of using Minecraft, not just as a game, but as a development platform.  As a parent AND creator, I understand that it is hard to accept that your baby has grown into something different than what was intended at the outset.  However, by missing out on the opportunity to empower the modding community, the game as a platform has reached its limitations.

This is what we want to improve upon - creating a framework for a game with the INTENT of it being a platform for creation whereby user generated content is king. Its not enough to just guess what is going to work, so we spend a lot of time internalizing the feedback from modders in the Minecraft, Skyrim, and Garry's Mod communities (to name drop a few).  I also spent some very valuable time with some of my favorite Minecraft community devs at Pax East with Ghost this year, and getting to know many of their needs gave us a very clear idea of how we need to proceed.  While each group has different needs due to varying sizes and access to resources, it seems to be the case that ultimately, none of these mod groups are accustomed to games actually FOCUSING on tools and technology with the modder in mind as the primary end user.

While we discussed all kinds of ideas in and around modding with active members of the community,  the second common theme was that the community functioned and existed almost entirely without ANY support from the game developers themselves, as if the devs were more interested in amputating a superfluous limb rather than trying to see how it could be integrated into a more efficient system .  As a consequence, the modding community has been one that has heavily relied on its own internal underground infrastructure to move forward - in that process an ENTIRELY new generations of developers has been born.  Many of these developers have families, or full time jobs, or are full time students working from dated machines - being torn between their own happiness, the anxiety of day-to-day survival, and fighting to avoid the disappointment of thousands to millions of fans that enjoy their works makes the struggle of the modding community a very visible one.

But what would happen if those developers in the modding community could actually make a living on their own?  What if we changed the way incentives worked to empower the mod community in parallel with the development of the game as a platform for creation?  What happens if the game devs created an ACTUAL working pipeline to work with other developers, modders, map makers, and server owners to create better tools? What could we create if we could focus full-time on making what has given so many of us hundreds, even thousands of hours of enjoyment?  What if all the pressure of nearly EVERY modders tools was not dumped on a single developer who had to kill himself playing catch up without the support of the official developers?  What if I stop writing up paragraphs with so many questions?!?!?!?!?!

I don’t have all the answers for these topics, yet… but with the full intention of creating this as a platform to empower the players and creators alike, we can work together to find the answers.

- Ino El Jefe

Be sure to check out our latest “In The Works” video here. You don’t want to miss this one.