Capcom: PC Game Mods Are Essentially Just Cheats By A Different Name
from the well-that's-certainly-a-take dept
It truly is amazing that the video game industry is so heavily divided on the topic of user-made game mods. I truly don’t understand it. My take has always been very simple: mods are good for gamers and even better for game makers. Why? Simple, mods serve to extend the useful life of video games by adding new ways to play them and therefore making them more valuable, they can serve to fix or make better the original game thereby doing some of the game makers work for them for free, and can simply keep a classic game relevant decades later thanks to a dedicated group of fans of a franchise that continues to be a cash cow to this day.
On the other hand are all the studios and publishers that somehow see mods as some kind of threat, even outside of the online gaming space. Take Two, Nintendo, EA: the list goes on and on and on. In most of those cases, it simply appears that control is preferred by the publisher over building an active community and gaining all the benefits that come along with that modding community.
And then there’s Capcom, which recently made some statements essentially claiming that for all practical purposes mods are just a different form of cheating and that mods hurt the gaming experience for the public.
As spotted by GamesRadar, during an October 25 Capcom R&D presentation about its game engine, cheating, and piracy, the company claims that mods are “no different” than cheats, and that they can hurt game development.
“For the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats,” Capcom explained. The only exception to this are mods which are “officially” supported by the developer and, as Capcom sees it, all user-created mods are “internally” no different than cheating.
Capcom goes on to say that some mods with offensive content can be “detrimental” to a game or franchise’s reputation. The publisher also explained that mods can create new bugs and lead to more players needing support, stretching resources, and leading to increased game development costs or even delays. (I can’t help but feel my eyes starting to roll…)
I’m sorry, but just… no. No to pretty much all of this. Mods do not need to be defined as cheats, particularly in offline single player games. Mods are mods, cheats are cheats. There are a zillion different aesthetic and/or quality of life mods that exist for hundreds of games that fall into this category. Skipping intro videos for games, which I do in Civilization, cannot possibly be equated to cheating within the game, but that’s a mod.
As to the claim that mods increase development time because support teams have to handle requests from people using mods that are causing problems within the games… come on, now. Support and dev teams are very distinct and I refuse to believe this is a big enough problem to even warrant a comment.
As to offensive mods, here I have some sympathy. But I also have a hard time believing that the general public is really looking with narrow eyes at publishers of games because of what third-party mods do to their product. Mods like that exist for all kinds of games and those publishers and developers appear to be getting on just fine.
Whatever the reason behind Capcom’s discomfort with mods, it should think long and hard about its stance and decide whether it’s valid. We have seen time and time again examples of modding communities being a complete boon to publishers and I see no reason why Capcom should be any different.
Filed Under: game mods, video games
Companies: capcom
Comments on “Capcom: PC Game Mods Are Essentially Just Cheats By A Different Name”
Capcom discomfort with mods is this.
YOU PLAY THE GAME ONLY AS WE TOLD YOU TO OR YOU MUST DIE!
But seriously. Many game developers view any deviation from their idea of how the game should be played as outright sinful.
I also bet that they view mods as theft when they add features they “could” of monetized.
I’ve never understood the hate for modders though.. Because in reality many are exactly the type of people you want to hire.
As for support claims… Capcom does not offer any official mod support, meaning anyone nodding their games know they did it. It’s also just as likely that Windows, programs, anti-viruses, drivers, or hardware can be the source of problems on a pc.
Re: Left handedness is once again a sin
My Capcom library discontinued years ago when a Dead Rising game didn’t have a means to customize the control profile (even by altering config files, which I’m happy to do).
Now I wonder if even accessibility alterations are too spicy for Capcom.
Pay $9.99 for 'Super Deluxe Levelling Booster' or get it for free from a mod...
It’s harder to sell people on dlc’s and especially micro/macro-transactions if modders can offer the same thing for free so of course the company’s going to be hostile towards them.
It’s a stupid argument but it does make some sense looked at through the lens of profits.
Re:
Sorry to dissent, TOG. But those microtransaction thingies? Boosts and whatever? If you’ve allowed the modding community access to those functions, you’ve already lost.
… and if you haven’t allowed the modding community access to those functions but they are modding them anyway, that’s game, set, and match. Pull down your tent and disappear into the night.
DLC might be quite a different matter. Modder-created DLC has always been fertile ground for embrace-and-expand. … and Employ. “You’re a bright lad. We could use more content developers. Whaddayasay…”
Re: Re:
It worked with Rimworld AND Dwarf Fortress.
And, hilariously enough, all of Bethseda’s games.
Re: Re: Re:
Hell, some of Mojang’s employees were modders of Minecraft before being hired, and features like Copper & Horses were mods before being added to the game (Horses were added thanks to “Mo’ Creatures” mod creator, Copper has been a part of tech mods like IndustrialCraft2 or Thermal Expansion since at least Release 1.2.5 back in April 2012).
Re:
People are still buying Rimworld expansions (what most DLCs for single-player games usually are) despite them being a group of mods Tynan thinks would work amazing with the base game. Hell, people LOVE costume DLCs.
Most games do not run the Microtransaction gamut… yet. Mobile games are a different story.
A developer's point of view
From within the code there are indeed, two states: Is this code approved, or is it not? That is, does it match the checksum/hash/signature(s) on the list, or does it not?
“Approved mods” would be mods whose characteristics have been added to the list. Anything else would be indistinguishable.
I do not know the modding scene well, but I am roughly familiar with how WoW handled things:
Thus, the developers could be fairly assured that the players were not going to be able to lie to the game server. Mods are outside the security wall, and thus “don’t care”. User experience is in the hands of the player; the first thing Customer Service would do is ask “does it still happen if you uninstall all your mods?”.
This. Capcom is whining about mods affecting development time, which is puzzling: do they not have QA and customer service running interference for their development team? Are the mods not insulated from the critical API? What’s going on there?
There is laziness involved: Either their modding API is not robust (and/or secure) or they are simply flagging anything not from them as “leper, outcast, unclean”. They simply don’t want to have to deal.
But from the statements given, what I do NOT see is “all modders are cheaters”.
Security is HARD. Ask anyone dealing with crypto. It requires an adversarial mindset. “Will allowing the user to modify this allow cheating?” The answer is different for every function, for every game. I think it most likely that they just don’t have things well developed for that environment.
Re:
Capcom has no mod support that I am aware of. All mods are unsupported.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
The Capcom anti-cheat grunt squad being dispatched to my house after I install the naked Jill Valentine mod for RE5
Imagine if Bethesda/Microsoft took this stance with Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout (Or any of the previous ones even.)
Bugs would exist for a decade. You’d be stuck looking like every other npc instead of a goth loli maid with a hammer the size of a horse.
Re:
Meanwhile, Mojang and Minecraft…
Mods, mods everywhere
Re:
See, and to me, this isn’t an argument for mods–that’s letting big companies get away with releasing buggy/unfinished games and counting on the community to pick up the slack. It’s one thing to encourage mods that expand gameplay or add quality of life features over time (especially on indie games without the big budgets), but when I’m watching someone play, say, Starfied in the days after release talking about waiting for mods to do things like make the interface playable I just can’t even. I love mods and I agree they can keep them relevant and playable and fun for longer than they would otherwise and game companies are dumb to try to block them, but I also don’t want to get in a space where big companies expect to use free community labor to make their $60+ games playable out of the box.
Weird when game companies are allergic to free value added and game longevity.
mods keep games alive, even when companies are slow to support them
I mean, part of the reason why Minecraft continues to do pretty well despite being released over a decade ago could, arguably, be the modding community.
Most notably, there isn’t a modding API for the Java Edition (there are datapacks and resource packs, but those are fairly limited and build on existing Minecraft functionality) — basically the community takes the JAR out, decompiles it, de-obfuscates the code, which they only provided the official mappings to encourage mods in 2020, and goes from there, which means that for most Minecraft mods, they either rely on mod-loading frameworks that don’t have the explicit blessing of Mojang up until very recently, and existed under the sufferance and implicit tolerance of Mojang.
Like, for at least two modders, their path not only led to Mojang’s support, but eventually their hiring, and their influence has already been seen on Minecraft’s game, technical backend and mechanics.
And there’s a lot that’s done, at least in the Java Edition (Bedrock, which is more tightly locked down, has a comparatively sparse modding space) despite the fact that most of (Java) modding is founded on reverse-engineering — everything from QOL mods, server administration, completely new worlds, extensive crafting and automation mods, up to a total conversion of the game. Pretty much the only thing Mojang comes down hard on are NFTs and sex mods, and considering the fact that it’s still supposed to be a kid’s game, well… I can’t blame them.
Interesting and revealing comparison for them to choose...
They’re cheats, are they? So, they are useful tools that savvy developers code for the purpose of making exhaustive testing easier? Which publishers dislike as they offer basic expected game functionality for free which nowadays they prefer to monetise? That sounds about right, yes.
MODS and GAMES
Mods can be seen as a resume too. Look at the Long War Team of XCOM fame of Firax. They managed to inspire the dev team to enable mod support for XCOM2. And now they are doing their own game, Terra Invicta. And the fact that they had a good mod under their belt helped their kickstarter go big.
As for other mods that became good, Team Fortress 2, and League of legends. There are probably others too. But mods can be used to keep old games alive or fun projects too. like mods can in some cases keep people coming back, or keep with a game and thus more willing to take chances. and it keeps people engaged. like Star craft 2. with own player maps and modes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_War_(mod)
not making sense to me
From my experience mods are something the game maker made possible. If they code the game to allow mods, then how could it be cheating? If you wanted your game to not be moddable then just dont code for it.
Re:
You cannot really “code a game to not be moddable”, that’s a fundamental impossibility, even old arcade boxes running entirely off ROM chips can have the ROM extracted and run through external software capable of intercepting and modifying it. Software is always moddable by its fundamental nature. You would not be able to make it in the first place otherwise.
Re:
All games are moddable. All software is moddable. It’s a series of ones and zeroes; a mod is something that changes some zeroes to ones, changes some ones to zeroes, and sometimes adds some extra ones and zeroes.
I think what you’re thinking of when you say that developers decide whether or not to make games moddable is that developers decide whether or not to make modding easier. Many developers (and especially western developers) provide modding tools and encourage the modding community to use them.
Capcom doesn’t do that; they actively discourage people from modding their games.
People still do it, and there’s not really any way to stop them. There are various DRM schemes that companies try to make sure only authorized versions of a game will run, but as you know if you read Techdirt regularly, those generally don’t work very well.
I’m fine with Capcom discouraging mod use for online play; it’s their servers and they can set the terms (and some mods really are used for cheating). But that comes with its own set of challenges too. It’s all DRM in one form or another, and DRM can be broken or fooled — because ultimately, DRM is software too, and can be modified.
(One caveat: if the game is streaming from a remote server and is never installed on your local machine, then that’s the one instance where the publisher can prevent you from modifying the game in any way. I’m sure Capcom would be very happy to do that, but when it comes to competitive games like Street Fighter, latency is a major issue with online play and streaming would increase it. Plus I think they still want to be able to charge $70 for the game, and that would be a tough sell for a game that you never actually install on your computer.)
Mods that give you god mode instant win abilities in a online multiplayer game? Fine, deal with that.
But that’s not what capcom is targeting, they got sand in their V over the sexy outfit mods for Street Fighter 6.
It’s not a new opposition to lewd mods but how they may approach shutting them down is which is quite hypocritical considering the abundance of lewd mods for Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil 4 Remake which never triggered any “violated public morals” response, only the Ashley/Street Fighter ladies mods.
Most of the game devs I know started by modding games.
Seriously, how much of modern games exist because people who were curious started making new levels or modding games to be different versions of games.
DOTA was a game mod before it was it’s own game.
IMO modding games it like hacking Ikea furniture. Sure, they make a decent storage shelf, but once I buy it I can make it work better for my needs by modifying it. As long as the mod doesn’t affect people who didn’t choose it, then modding is just making something you purchased more suitable for your own uses.
Re:
I think there’s a cultural element here, too.
Certainly there have been western companies that have taken stands against modding before, but it seems more common among Japanese publishers. I think there’s a sense that playing a game in a way that’s not how the publisher intended it is offensive in some way, that it compromises the creative vision.
Though of course I don’t think other posters are wrong that part of it is just publishers worried it’ll impact their DLC sales.
As a game dev of 30 years or so, the problem is that, from the code point of view, mods are indistinguishable from cheats.
So don’t allow them…
On the other hands, it’s not possible to stop them and they really do increase the value of the game.
So support them…
Damn.
Nonetheless Capcom’s comments are completely ridiculous.
All water is defined as thunderstruck irredentist pseudopodia. Deal with it.
My take has always been very simple: mods are good for gamers and even better for game makers. Why? Simple, mods serve to extend the useful life of video games by adding new ways to play them and therefore making them more valuable, they can serve to fix or make better the original game thereby doing some of the game makers work for them for free, and can simply keep a classic game relevant decades later thanks to a dedicated group of fans of a franchise that continues to be a cash cow to this day.
You kinda answered your own question. Why would game publishers want anybody keeping their old games going?
To simplify: any time and effort that gamers waste creating/playing mods to older games are nothing but distractions and obstacles that get in the way of selling newer releases.
Well, there’s two issues here
The first is mods trip cheat code to find and catch cheating.
Online gaming has opened up to the world now and for those that actually play online, cheating is an issue.
Why they don’t just ban any modded game is beyond me( if you mod the game, stay offline).
Another big issue is content. From self righteous members of governments to crappy rules from Sony regarding content, anything that can rock the boat is frowned upon by the developers.
I’m not sure what capcom has an a problem with directly, but that’s the well documented concerns
Re: Why not just ban modded games?
Bethesda’s business model presents one reason: it depends on end-user mods to make their game better.
And then there’s those of us who need additional accessibility. Think it’s cheating if I mod the game to reverse the Y-axis on my mouse? Or to re-key the game because I play left handed? Or do you think south-paws and people with disabilities should be restricted to those games in which the developers gave options to cover their needs?
Of course, some games started as mods, such as Left 4 Dead starting as a Counter Strike mod, and Counter Strike starting as a Team Fortress mod.
Re: Re:
I’m a lefty. Those settings can be set in your OS without modding the game. Nice try.
With rare exceptions accessibility options set by the os are transparent. The game has no idea which way you set your mouse.
The vast majority of games include key and mouse/controller options built in.
If you mod the game stay offline. Their goal is to end cheating. Any change in code is going to trip that search.
Misreading Capcom
Capcom is not saying that all mods are cheats and that is clear from the full statement.
Their anti-cheat and anti-piracy measures can only tell which code is approved or not. If code, any code whatever its function, isn’t approved then the countermeasures classify that code as a cheat or as piracy and prevent functionality.
Them not Saying mods are cheats but ‘merely’ Treating mods as being cheats isn’t exactly that much better. It’s arguably a lot worse.
This is a purely technical issue
There is no way for the code to tell the difference between a cheat and a mod, technically they are exactly the same thing. Humans make that distinction. Machines do not.
If you kid the game you should stay offline with that mod.
At code level, some mods may be seen as cheats, but not all.
An epic sword could be considered a cheat, but user created levels or costumes do not alter the gameplay in any way. They are alterations of the code or expansions of the data files, but cannot be considered cheats.
No, they are NOT “technically” the same thing.