Analysis of Popularity of Game Mods: A Case Study

Video game mods have become an integral part of the gameplay experience for PC gamers and have drawn support of major game development companies. This area, nevertheless, is not well understood, especially in terms of what motivates mod creators and users. To explore this question we propose a data-driven approach that relies on data that can be obtained from online fora devoted for game mods. To illustrate our approach, we have collected data on deployment and popularity for the mods in six major PC games made by two companies and spanning more than a decade from different popular mod hosting websites. In particular, we investigate what features are present in the mods that are being developed and what features are popular among mod users. To accomplish that, we propose measures of popularity of the mods based on the number of unique downloads and define mod feature space by the tags associated with each mod. The preliminary investigation suggests, for example, that the features developed across the distinct games to be similar but the sets of features popular among users were only marginally similar to the sets of features being implemented by mod creators. We plan surveys of mod users and mod creators to determine causes for this discrepancy. We hope that our approach would allow answering important research and practical questions in the area of game mod development.