The gaming market is booming. There is a widespread opinion that 2023 was one of the best years for gaming ever. The gaming industry has come a long way in the last few decades.
Many things helped her along the way, but only one thing was absolutely essential. While realistic graphics, immersive soundtracks and memorable characters are certainly important parts of the gaming industry, fans are undoubtedly the heart that keeps it alive.
What would video games be without fans? Correct: nothing. Fans are the judge in the process of success or flop, the wind that guides the sail towards profit and the tester who leads the project to completion with their opinion. They breathe life into the industry by buying, playing and discussing games.
They're the reason gaming brands can grow through merch, board games, books and even movies. As soon as a game loses its fans, it is doomed.
Particularly committed fans even use their time and creativity to adapt, improve and expand their favorite games according to their wishes, sometimes with great success.
Modifications are now an integral part of games like Skyrim or Minecraft and with Black Mesa, Portal Revolution and Co., several fan projects have already made it into the Steam shop as independent games. At the same time, the developers of Team Fortress 2: Source, Portal 64, Pokémon Uranium and many others were banned from distributing their fan projects.
Source: Moby Games Pokémon Uranium So what place do fan games and mods have in the video game industry? How do developers react to this? Do they support the creations of their fans or do they do everything they can to eliminate them? Does fan content only serve as an extension and completion of games, or is it already an integral part of our consumer behavior?
Fan content defined
To anticipate the answer to the last question: both. But let's start from the beginning: in order to better analyze fan content, let's first define what is meant by it. I'm not talking about games that are simply inspired by existing titles, but about fan creations that complement the original games in some way.
Firstly, this happens through modifications to a game, abbreviated as mods. Mods are the expansion or modification of a video game. They are implemented directly into the game, similar to DLC.
In contrast to a DLC, they do not come from the actual developer, but mostly from hobby developers, and are not chargeable. Games like Skyrim (and all other Bethesda games), Minecraft and The Sims are good examples of large modding scenes.
Second, fan content consists of standalone games. This refers to games that have their own identity, but use the engine, characters or lore of the original game to a greater or lesser extent. When an existing game is changed or expanded and published as a stand-alone, it is – confusingly – also referred to as mods.
Source: Moby Games Skyrim Such games include, for example, the Portal 2 mods Portal Stories: Mel and Portal Revolution. As already mentioned. Fan projects do not necessarily have to use the engine of the original game or can modify it significantly. For example, Black Mesa upgrades the original Half-Life title from the GoldSrc engine to an improved version of the Source engine.
Thirdly, it can also be the case that a game started as a mod of another game and only later became its own game. An example of this is The Forgotten City, which was initially a Skyrim mod.
The distinction between which fan games can be considered mods and which cannot is very confusing. To avoid any confusion, one can use the term fan content to generalize.
Now that the term is clearly defined, we can take a closer look at what fan content means to the communities of different games.
Quelle: Moby Games
The Forgotten City
The roots of fan ideas
The reasons why fan content is created are varied. Often, fans make it their mission to correct the mistakes developers made in their games. These include bugs, glitches, spongy textures, imprecise controls and confusing menus.
It's not for nothing that SkyUI and the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch are among the most downloaded mods on the Nexus Mods site. SkyUI completely overhauls the inventory and makes it more user-friendly and clear, while the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch fixes hundreds of bugs.
Another reason fan content is so popular is that it allows you to do things that would never have been possible in the base game. Modders can be creative and add features that they felt were missing in the original version.
There are Skyrim mods created by fans with new quests, graphical updates, custom companions or revised combat techniques, some of which have millions of downloads and all aim to make the game more immersive and unique.
There are also mods for The Sims 4 that add new careers, new clothing or new social activities. The Portal 2 mod Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative also changes the concept of the base game by allowing the player to shoot the paint gel themselves with a cannon and thus solve puzzles based on it.