Capcom Thinks PC Game Modding Is 'No Different Than Cheating' (gamesradar.com) 93
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamesRadar: For years now, fans have been using mods to alter games in weird and wonderful ways. Some developers are happy to let fans play around with their creations, while others aren't so keen on the idea. Capcom, the company behind many iconic game series, including Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Devil May Cry, is seemingly in the latter camp. This was evidenced in a presentation shared on the Capcom R&D YouTube channel. In the video, the company talks about cheating and piracy in PC games and the impact they can have. As Capcom sees it, mods are part of this problem.
During the presentation (around the 14-minute mark), Capcom suggests that mods are "no different" than cheats. "All mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported," it says. "What they are doing internally is no different than cheating." It's not that the company is staunchly against players using mods to enhance or switch up the experience; it does acknowledge that "the majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game." Still, from a business perspective, it warns that they "can be detrimental", both in terms of the reputational damage that offensive mods can cause and the extra workload players who've installed buggy mods can generate for a support team. This, the company argues, can ultimately lead to delays in a game's production and higher development costs.
During the presentation (around the 14-minute mark), Capcom suggests that mods are "no different" than cheats. "All mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported," it says. "What they are doing internally is no different than cheating." It's not that the company is staunchly against players using mods to enhance or switch up the experience; it does acknowledge that "the majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game." Still, from a business perspective, it warns that they "can be detrimental", both in terms of the reputational damage that offensive mods can cause and the extra workload players who've installed buggy mods can generate for a support team. This, the company argues, can ultimately lead to delays in a game's production and higher development costs.
Get the pitchforks and torches! (Score:3)
Just kidding.
Corporate types like to be in control, just like everyone else.
Re:well duh (Score:4, Interesting)
I know OP is either a derp or a troll, but I gotta...
Having worked directly with multiple Japanese game studios, they're not magical, and some of them are barely even competent. There's also cultural issues that prevent them from iterating towards better results, especially in creative or subjective disciplines.
And, they work their devs to death even compared to the US, which is total bullshit.
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They tend to honor their superiors, we tend to honor the CEO.
Deserved or not, this is a fault we all work in. The biggest difference is, US it isnt cultural to honor or respect superiors.
But Id say people still blindly do here in the USA, which is why you see weird things like people in the US still working for Twitter, even though Musk was making them sleep at work after he fired half of the work force.
Its so bizarre to me to give that much to a company that
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literally no one honors the CEO lol
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Would you mind expanding on the cultural issues that prevent them from iterating towards better results, please?
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Or user agency of any kind. As a broad generalization Japanese games feel more like movies to be experienced in comparison to Western games that feel more like toys to be played with.
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The best games support mods (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm just old but all my favorite games actively encourage people to make mods for the games. Some of them even started that way from day one. In fact, neverwinter night's came with an entire toolkit to let you make your own adventures and you can also use other modelling software to add stuff in. It's a spectacular example of how to build a community around a game that will last decades.
Someone could make a newer version of the game, with a toolset, and if they were smart would continue making donwloadable content for the modders to ever expand the potential of their game. It would create a wonderful community and if the company continued to release additional doodads and environment palettes they would basically have a continued income stream. Seems like a win win to me.
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Counter Strike started as a mod to Half Life.
Mods are mods. It shows an attitude difference and a difference in thinking, and this shows the difference between schools of thought. For example, third party add-ons are fine, if not a must in WoW, while in FFXIV, they are verboten.
Re: The best games support mods (Score:2)
Modding Team Fortress or Counter-Strike assets to make louder footstep sounds, more visible players, putting windows in levels etc. IS AND ALWAYS WAS cheating. There was even a time the server would boot you for accidentally using the console command to change the color of your pants when early TF and CTF used the default player skins.
The slide differentiates between supported mods and what anyone with two brain cells can see is cheating. Why are people so stupid?
People are still at it today, "it's not chea
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Re:The best games support mods (Score:5, Insightful)
I think their mod/cheating issue is for multiplayer games, where one can make enemy human players more easily visible and then it's not fair. Maybe the games you are referring to were essentially single-player like the classical Doom / Doom 2 where user-created mods (wad files) are being published for 3 decades to great success.
Equally fair/unfair (Score:3)
Is it unfair if the mod affects all players equally? Sure, I can see my enemies more clearly (using your example), but they can also see me more clearly. How is that unfair?
Seems to me it's only cheating if it gives one player/team an advantage that the others don't also have.
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I think I've heard of those kinds of mods where you alter the client side files to render enemies in a different way that makes them stick out. That's cheating. Competitive multiplayer games need to be fair though people are always cheating in those games anyway. Those scenarios are always essentially an arms race between devs and cheaters.
I guess I stopped playing those games before I stopped being a teenager because they just weren't as fun and worse were just toxic. Can't imagine they got any better sinc
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Also let's not forget that Streetfighter is the way it is because of the modding/piracy scene.
SF2CE is pretty sedate compared to Turbo. Turbo kind of set the scene for the faster paced games which came to define the genre. SF2T was a reaction to Rainbow and the other pirated mods which among daft hacks also increased the pace of the game substantially. They proved very popular despite the massive unbalance from the other hacks, and going back to SF2CE felt sluggish by comparison.
Though CE is still probably
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You assume that both sides actually have the mod installed. That is not guaranteed. If one side has a mod that increases the hitbox of heads tenfold and the other does not, guess who'll get more headshots.
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If one side has a mod that increases the hitbox of heads tenfold and the other does not, guess who'll get more headshots.
Neither. Assuming the game isn't so stupidly designed as to blindly accept a "you're dead" message from another adversarial system. But alas, we seem to be awash with poorly designed games these days.....
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The problem is policing it. How are you going to check that the mod a particular player is using is fair?
I think it's a cash grab. They have their own DLC like costumes, so can't have modders offering bikini Chun Li for free. They always claim security with mods, piracy, unauthorized streaming, but in reality it's always profit.
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No, server-side mods that treat everyone the same are not what's causing the concern.
The "cheating" complaint is mainly about client-side mods in multi-player games, especially combat-oriented multi-player games.
Somebody's being overbroad in their use of language when they just lump everything together as "mods", but they're not _wrong_ as such, they're just stating their case imprecisely.
MMOs not Multiplayer (Score:5, Insightful)
I think their mod/cheating issue is for multiplayer games, where one can make enemy human players more easily visible and then it's not fair.
It's not that simple. It has to be an MMO, not just multiplayer. There are plenty of multiplayer games like Minecraft, Stellaris etc. which have excellent mods that enhance and extend the replayability of the game. Only in MMOs, where you have to connect to their servers to play, does an anti-mod stance possibly make sense.
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This is news why?
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There's also a pretty big difference between, "Game modding is no different than cheating." and, "What they are doing internally is no different than cheating." This seems like a misrepresentation by the author. I could watch the youtube video to get some context, maybe fi
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All mods are cheats unless otherwise encouraged by the developer. That has ALWAYS been the case, for both Japanese and American game devs.
Multiplayer games, all unauthorized mods are cheating and bannable. Stream it or show the mod on youtube, and enjoy your ban from the game.
Single player games, do whatever you want unless you are streaming it or putting a video with the mod up on youtube. That will get the attention of the developer. Often in bad ways.
The only games I'm aware of that the developer has exp
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Multiplayer games, all unauthorized mods are cheating and bannable.
For MMOs perhaps but there are many multiplayer games that are not MMOs: Minecraft, Stellaris, EU IV etc. These all have strong modding communities that are encouraged by the developer but the developer does not "authorize" mods: you are free to pick the ones you like and use them in your own games. Some are clearly very "cheaty" others not so much.
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Client-side mods for certain types of multi-player games can definitely be problematic and lead to really gross unfair advantages. Like retro-actively misreporting the player's position to avoid taking damage in a combat game, for example.
On the other hand you have mods that introduce entirely new content to the game, which all the players can explore and enjoy, and that's altogether a different thing.
Not that there can't be a blurry line between them in some edge cases.
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Well, some people do not get it (Score:3)
No problem, somebody must make all those 2nd and 3rd rated games.
Cheating in Single Player? (Score:3)
I can see why unofficial mods wouldn't be wanted in multiplayer games, but for single player games and even multiplayer games on user servers, who cares?
It's not like people are seeing others building a cooler house and complaining about it.
speed runs and high scores may be the only thing (Score:2)
speed runs and high scores may be the only thing
Re: Cheating in Single Player? (Score:2)
And cs made valve mountains of money and kept half life selling for like a decade.
Re: Cheating in Single Player? (Score:1)
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Many games these days don't support user servers, only servers operated by the game vendor (which makes the game useless once those servers are shut down).
Thus you can't really make content mods, since the official servers won't have the content. The only mods you can really make are for cheating.
Games like quake were better, no centralised servers but many servers run by users and services like gamespy to help you find them - some of which used custom maps or other mods. If you want to cheat, you can find
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Running servers these days is only hard because of corporate greed and control of the way games work. Technical issues aren't why we don't have private servers.
Shit, we've even come to the point where we have reverse-engineered some MMO game clients and made our own private servers. You can now easily download binaries or source code from various projects that let you run an entire wow server that either lets you host a server for yourself or a group of friends or more. It's painfully easy to setup if you g
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Many games these days don't support user servers, only servers operated by the game vendor (which makes the game useless once those servers are shut down).
I find that particularly troubling. I do a lot of software and hardware preservation work as a hobby and this trend towards making everything ephemeral is upsetting. Resurrecting stuff from the 60s and 70s today is hard enough, but it's a cake walk compared to what the folks trying to save anything modern are doing. It's about a lot more than just games, though that's a big part of the motivation for some people.
One of the things I'd like to see in right-to-repair legislation is the ability for people to
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They sell costumes (Score:5, Insightful)
Capcom doesn't want anything in their game unless they're making money off of it. They don't want people installing free models and costumes if it competes with their monetization.
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Yep, simple greed is almost certainly 90% of it.
There's probably a weird Japanese NIH mindset too; game directors with over-inflated egos and a strange "all hail our glorious auteur - they made this game" mindset from others in the company.
Not that that is uniquely Japanese, they just seem to embody it more than most.
It makes sense (Score:1)
Many mods are cheats in that they give the player an advantage, like easily accessible powerful items, or access to hidden data, like damage stats in Monster Hunter. In many case the only difference between a mod and a cheat is your opinion on it.
And for the people working with the game: devs, sales, community managers, etc... they are indeed similar. It is code and data that is injected in the came client in a way they can't control and may break the game. And when the game breaks, they are expected to dea
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Many mods are cheats in that they give the player an advantage
The word "many" is doing some heavy lifting there and may even be classed as intentionally dishonest. No the overwhelming majority of mods aren't cheats. They are typically visual changes or quality of life improvements (UI changes). That's before you even get into an entire category of mods to enhance performance, add support for hardware that was omitted (VR mods, DLSS mods), or are just straight up reshades to give the final result a different rendered feel.
We can use your own very example, Monster Hunte
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I would go so far as to agree that Cheats and Mods are the same technically, in the context that Capcom has presented. Changing the game is changing the game, programmatically.
This doesn't mean they are the same thing, because of intent and utility. That is not a useful subtlety, when Capcom's lawyers are rationalizing their own greed.
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What are we cheating on? The vast majority of mods do not affect the rules of a game. Even in Capcom's context the equivalency is disingenuous.
Unless you're talking about cheating Capcom out of revenue by not being able to sell you a different coloured skin, ... in that case yeah we're messing up the rules of their profit centre.
Re: It makes sense (Score:2)
The point is that they sell dlc "mods" that are cheats.
So they don't want cheats to be available for free. Thats all it is.
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KSP became the hit it was exactly because it was modable. A lot of features that exist today first existed as mods, and the developers could actually get away with not creating any new content (like other rocket modules or engines) for a long time because that was something the modders took care of. And that's also why they could get away with a production time of almost 10 years in early access/beta.
KSP2 is the train wreck it is (48% positive reviews on Steam, only 35% positive in the past 30 days) because
They're not differentiating intentionally (Score:4, Insightful)
They want a generic poopoo on mods. Mix the bad with the what serves them. Modding on multiplayer games is often cheating if it's a competitive game, but those people are in denial like NOO NOO I'm not cheating it's just a mod to play the way I enioy! Twisting it for their own selfishness.
GTA 5 was a great example as that manipulation. Instead of people saying 'People are using hacks to cheat on public servers' they're saying they're using 'mods' although technically correct, the purpose is a higher mention point then the technicalities.
The other foot though is game developers absolutely hate when there is products, features or things they could charge for, or include as a reason to purchase their latest release, but someone made the mod available to add this to their game for free, so the developers can't use that idea, make it and charge for it. Why would you pay for what someone contributed willingly besides a donation to the OG creator?
Better textures, spells and places in skyrim? Now it's harder to just throw that into a new game to convince people to buy it.
In some cases, developers don't have the time or resources to add all the features or content they want to a game, and modders make that game shine and super successful, so developers can be very grateful for a game that might have been more mediocre before.
Companies that have a lot of resources want to be like the diamond companies, having a huge stock of diamonds (content and features) sitting in their vaults, releasing a little at a time to maximize profits and keep the market value high, instead of having to constantly open new diamond minds (Come up with new features, ideas and develop them) at a higher cost, lowering their returns.
Keep in mind this is a bit of apples to oranges but the overall concept is a pain point for them.
Remember when Capcom was relevant? (Score:3)
Back in the arcade games. Yep. Been a long time. Now they are also digging their own grave, in a surprising fast pace.
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I remember when they produced games that people wanted to play. Yeah, I'm old.
But relevant? Relevant, they were never.
Whiny little control freak bitches. (Score:2, Interesting)
My storage.
My processing power.
My supporting software.
If I want to mod my textures and local models to look like "DragonBall Z"? I WILL.
So long as I'm not trying to gain a competitive performance advantage in-game from modding the software, that's fine.
And they have NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT.
I can ALREADY do that simply by upgrading HARDWARE.
(Off!) It is the place you should fuck!
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I can ALREADY do that simply by upgrading HARDWARE.
Not really. Most software performance depends on kernel based timing functions and table (memory) sizes. All of which can be made independent of the host system's performance.
In many apps, improving the systems performance will certainly improve that of the app. Why would you not allow a user to speed up a spreadsheet? But multiplayer games are a special case where the object is to give all players an even field.
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So you're telling me that Ryzen 3 3000-series and a 980 GTX on a hard drive based system no more performant than a Ryzen 9 7000 and a 4090 RTX on an SSD-based platform...
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It shouldn't be if the game coders did a decent job. The higher speed SSD based system shouldn't load a new scene* faster for one player than another**. Giving them an advantage in a shooting game.
*One of many variables that should be under the game's control.
**Assuming the slower system meets some minimum requirements.
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The only way that works is if the programmers have artificially crippled their product.
Online multilayer? (Score:2)
Re: Online multilayer? (Score:2)
Many, it would be an issue for selling dlc cheats(items) or an issue for selling the same game with slightly updated graphics.
Of Course (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, it is what they think. Capcom has nothing but mid IPs and mid developers. They haven't released a title that is above a 5/10 in over 20 years. All their PC ports suck. Capcom may as well be dead for all intents and purposes. They will probably never release a quality game again, though, I would love to be proven wrong.
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Of course, it is what they think. Capcom has nothing but mid IPs and mid developers. They haven't released a title that is above a 5/10 in over 20 years. All their PC ports suck. Capcom may as well be dead for all intents and purposes. They will probably never release a quality game again, though, I would love to be proven wrong.
This. I'm struggling to think of a Capcom game I've wanted to play in the last 20 years. They used to be good back in the SNES days but have done nothing since.
Also, crappy console ports are exactly why mods are so useful to PC gamers. When the publisher/developer doesn't care, the community does.
Plain english version (Score:2)
"We do not care that you improve your experience of the game, we want you to silently accept, buy, and cheer whatever game we make regardless whether you like it or not"
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Makes sense for Capcom to say that, I mean, when was the last time they released a game that was actually good enough to be met with cheer or ... well, anything but a "meh" coming from the heart?
Mods aren't cheats (Score:1)
Some mods are incredible, going way beyond the games they are based on. Examples abound from the Doom/Quake era: CounterStrike, Team Fortress... but even for more recent games - e.g. Multiverse, the FTL mod.
But others are the quality of life improvements that make a game better to play - Skyrim's script extender and replacement UI.
Is it really all cheating? That makes no sense.
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Depends how multiplayer is structured...
If you can run your own server, then you can do so and add your mods to that server with whatever new content you like and people can either choose to play on your server abiding by your rules or not - and anyone is free to make their own server to play with their friends.
It's not cheating if everyone is playing by the same rules.
On the other hand if the servers are centrally controlled by the game developer, you can't add new content to it all you can do is mod your
Nothing wrong with cheating in a 1P game (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with cheating or modding single player games.
If I buy your game cheap and cheat to remove the badly designed bits, like the pointless grinding you inserted to double the 'length' of it, that's perfectly legit. Then there's all the community mods to fix the graphics the you completely botched. Or maybe I just want a rainbow afro on Leon.
And can you imagine playing a Bethesda game without mods? Ha! Well, I've actually done it for a while, but that was a terrible experience and then mods made it way better. Some games are great as is and don't need any mods / cheats, like Vampire Survivors. But otherwise, you put out a game that doesn't meet my needs, and I 'fixed' it, for me. That is absolutely my right and 100% ethical for me to do.
Of course cheating in multiplayer PvP is bad, m'kay, but I wouldn't do that - especially because I hate those games and don't play them.
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>If I buy your game
I'm old fashioned. I bought your game? I can do whatever the fuck I want with it on my own computer, and fuck you if you think otherwise.
That, of course, is why most stuff now requires an online connection - so they can keep you dependent on them past the initial purchase, subject to a subscription or PtW pressure as well as ads and DLC. So you can no longer own your games.
In terms of policing potential cheating in a multiplayer environment, sure. "You must have a standard unmodifi
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That, of course, is why most stuff now requires an online connection
And that is why I don't buy that kind of crap. When it comes to games, when it comes to home automation, when it comes to "smart" anything.
Either you sell me something and I own it, or you offer it for rent and replace it when it breaks down. Choose.
It's because most of the mods are skins (Score:5, Insightful)
It's how things get enshitified. Mega corporations demand unending profit growth every year and if they don't get it they demand drastic changes to get it. If you're into the Sega Total War games the same thing is happening there where they hit the peak of their user base around 2.5 million players and that's not enough to satisfy the insatiable Mall of Wall Street. So they demanded smaller games released more often with less gameplay so they can sell more to those 2.5 million
At a certain point I think we need to start questioning if this is really how we want our capitalist economy to function. I get that everybody likes watching their 401K go up but that also assumes that you have a 401k and that it's actually going up. Not that anyone will be liable to admit it but I'm willing to bet that's damn few of us here. An exchange for the promise of a retirement we will probably lose when Wall Street gambles away our earnings just before we retire we get basically everything around us going to shit
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If you're into the Sega Total War games the same thing is happening there where they hit the peak of their user base around 2.5 million players and that's not enough to satisfy the insatiable Mall of Wall Street. So they demanded smaller games released more often with less gameplay so they can sell more to those 2.5 million
I'd personally like to see a Shogun Total War 3, but that's a wish that I've had for over 12 years.... Guess I'm not part of their user base then.
What's a mod? (Score:2)
And how do you detect it? If somebody patches the executable to fiddle around with the skins, who cares? But if that changes a checksum of the binary and that masks a possible performance change, that may not be allowed.
A game designed to allow some modding would probably isolate the appearance and performance code in different libraries (DLLs). And checksum only the latter. But that's a lot of work and may not generate the additional sales to make it worthwhile.
Allow all mods on an honor system and when
Long gone (Score:2)
Long gone are the days of Unreal and the Serpentine mod ... MisterMoose says Moo! Games today suck because of corporate assholes. Squeeze every penny out of the players. I have not purchased a top tier game in years. Just not worth it.
That's a good trick (Score:3)
Nude Chun-Li Mod (Score:2)
Of course Capcom is pissed about modding.
There was a SF6 tournament held on twitch channel Corner2Corner where a streamer had a Nude Chun-Li mod installed, leading to a few seconds of that footage being broadcast before they cut footage. That kind of thing doesn't reflect well for Capcom.
Clueless (Score:2)
The market that Capcom comes from is the arcade where it's all about pumping the player for quarters. It's not about making a fun game, or an engrossing simulation, just keeping those quarters coming. So it makes sense that they'd have this mindset, and it translates well into the microtransaction model that most mobile games have nowadays. But any PC game made by Capcom is just going to be a port that maintains this mentality. Ultimately this will never allow a Capcom game to be ranked among the best PC ga
Not every game is a PvP deathmatch (Score:2)
For example, Animal Crossing has some islands running on modded Switches that have any in game items available for free to all visitors. So? Some people don't have the time to play special events year round and just want a particular item for aesthetics. Even if they are cheating, they are only cheating themselves. For e-sports, I agree that it should be tightly controlled environment for fairness, including no macro keyboards unless everyone has one. Even when there are competitions, not all competitions a
My ebike is cheating, too (Score:1)
There's a bunch of people who hate ebikes because they are 'cheating', too. Cheating at what? Riding a bike? These execs get dumber every minute.
I paid for the game (Score:2)
And I will play it however I choose
From a business perspective, it sure is bad (Score:2)
How do you think we could sell you a 20 bucks DLC that basically just reskins some characters and weapons if you could do that yourself and even distribute it for free?
Mods vs Games as a Service (Score:2)
Never been a big Capcom fan (Score:2)
Will definitely be staying away from their stuff , if this is how they feel.
AI (Score:2)
The only thing i learned from this 'article' is that GamesRadar now appears to use AI to generate their articles. The article shows no real understanding of the subject which is the presentation discussed