this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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2002’s Neverwinter Nights gets a patch in 2025 from “unpaid software engineers” (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think it is a picture worth painting.

In the golden age of modding? People were buying games like UT2k4 and NWN and Oblivion for the mods. It was a huge shock when (after the Make Something Unreal contest made it clear that it was just as hard to make your own game as to make a major TC) UT3 had next to no mod support from the community.

And people still (kind of rightfully...) refuse to play a Bethesda game without the "community patch" and so forth.

For the games that support them (and even some that don't), mods are a major part of the marketing and support of games. And yet the studio/publisher makes bank whereas the people fixing those bugs just get abuse.

And that ignores stuff like the recent Bethesda games where experiments were made for paid mods. People immediately lost their shit because fuck that person who made the really cool crafting mod I can't play without, I already gave Microsoft 5 bucks ten years ago!

So yeah. I think there is a lot of reason to start looking at things like they are. Mods, especially "unofficial patches", are work done by unpaid engineers. People can still decide they don't deserve any money but they should at least have to "say" "unpaid labor doesn't deserve anything".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

And people still (kind of rightfully...) refuse to play a Bethesda game without the "community patch" and so forth.

1000% justified. Skyrim was released in November 2011, there's still bugs that haven't been fixed by Bethesda. Without mods it's not a fully functional game.