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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Because it makes for better games.

To me the golden era of gaming was about 10 years ago. Game engines weren't designed to make Hollywood blockbusters (see the current Battlefield engine and series). They were easily moddable. Maybe not surprisingly from that era came Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Desert Combat (the precursor to Battlefield 2) and mods you've never heard of like Tribes Football which anticipated Rocket League by 2 decades.

In other words, almost everything that exists today existed a decade or more and probably had more features. The current business model favors locked-down engines that have semi-regular releases of DLC or an entirely new game every year or two. This is horrible for building communities and pushes publishers to neglect games.

A more open view of game development would avoid a lot of this constant reinvention of the wheel and should create better content.

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10 years ago people were saying the same thing (Team Fortress Classic is getting to be more like two decades ago). There is still a ton of modding going on, maybe even more in absolute terms, but a lot of people who would have gotten into modding back then are making their own games in Unity (and occasionally UE) instead.

You're looking at the past through rose colored glasses. Most games of a decade ago did not have a mod scene. Those few that did either had active / tacit support from the developer or were loved enough that fans did the work of reverse engineering them.

Yes, and my point is that all of that happend without the tacit support of the developer. People were willing to do that for free with no ownership.

Now if they could take what they created and own it (and really own it, not just rent tech via licensing) and have a profitable business model going forward, there's no telling what that would do for the gaming industry as a whole.

I would propose that you just don't remember all the games that weren't changeable, didn't have interesting mods, and that just the place where you find those games has shifted. I don't know a moddable recent shooter (possibly because I don't care about shooters, possibly because none exists), but other games, outside the shooter AAAs, have tons of mods.

There's always going to be garbage, but at least if all those mods that nobody remembers were open source, either the games or features could have new life instead of sitting in an empty room somewhere.

That's a different aspect, I was merely challenging the notion that there were the "golden days of gaming with modding" that are now over.

If anything, now you can easily get a game engine for free so you don't have to mod a game to get one.

For now gaming communities have managed surprisingly well to keep old games alive, the biggest threat I see here is the growing move towards "always online" models and no provisions for local multiplayer in AAA titles.

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