Should you allow modding of your game?

Should you make all assets in your game in open formats (like PNG) and easily moddable,
or should you encrypt or obfuscate files as much as possible?

Open simple formats:
+players can mod the game and have fun, promote the game, more sales
-players can mod the game and play it for years instead of buying sequel, losing you millions
-some people and companies can steal your assets and put into their game and you will never find out about it

Allow modding if you want. That's a design and business decision.

PNG would be a terrible choice for game textures. They're great for the purpose they're designed for, they're great for network transmission, lossless encoding and situations where you don't care about relatively slow decompression times. Games typically use hardware-friendly game formats. PNG works as an intermediate format, but generally not for final assets because they have memory-intensive and processor-intensive decompression steps. For many systems S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) is common because it's supported directly on the card, also called DXTn or BCn textures or DDS files, Some devices prefer ASTC format, or perhaps PVRTC format. Find out what your system uses for the actual graphics resource and use that.

Even so, sure, if you want to do png processing, that's a design and business decision primarily.

Note that many game engines support it directly. Unreal automatically scans a mods subdirectory for mod paks and loads them, unless you take steps to disable it. Unity has some tools to allow it, but most modders start with BepInEx to do the work and then just drop the mod files into the expected directory.

Both systems automatically expose all the interfaces through their respective reflection mechanisms.

As for fears about people stealing your assets, they already have your assets by you releasing your game. Any fear that they'd somehow steal them is irrational, you've already handed them out.

gamelordofdeath said:
Should you make all assets in your game in open formats (like PNG) and easily moddable, or should you encrypt or obfuscate files as much as possible?

Technically it's more about compression than about encryption. It's about efficient loading / streaming. Games also often store some asset multiple times, in multiple files, so it can be loaded faster without a need to jump across multiple files, which is very slow on optical media.

Ofc. this makes it harder to mod the games, but it does not necessarily mean the devs try to obfuscate the content.

gamelordofdeath said:
some people and companies can steal your assets and put into their game and you will never find out about it

That's really unlikely.
The real problem is: Somebody may put Hitler and boobs into your game, show it on YT, and some people may think it's your fault.
I guess that's the reason why devs may decide to obfuscate.

frob said:
Allow modding if you want. That's a design and business decision.

I don't know if I want. I am scared that modders will steal my profits. They release assets for free, people play game longer without paying me. And the mods compete with the game sequels or DLCs. People can play my game with mods for 1000 hours while paying me only a single time.

If my game won't have mods, people will have to buy sequels and DLCs from me and I will earn more money. Mods are stealing my profits.

frob said:
As for fears about people stealing your assets, they already have your assets by you releasing your game. Any fear that they'd somehow steal them is irrational, you've already handed them out.

Yes but if you encrypted and obfuscated assets, it would be harder to steal. If someone will have to pay to reverse engineer your game to steal the assets, he could instead pay to create his own assets.

But I think obfuscation and encryption don't work, because they can steal your assets directly from video memory, where you have unencrypted mesh and textures. They could also run your game with fake DirectX/OpenGL library that reads all the commands and data that is sent.

JoeJ said:
Ofc. this makes it harder to mod the games, but it does not necessarily mean the devs try to obfuscate the content.

Maybe they want to obfuscate and not allow mods. They lose profits from mods.

JoeJ said:
The real problem is: Somebody may put Hitler and boobs into your game, show it on YT, and some people may think it's your fault.

That's not bad. Hitler and boobs would be good promotion of your game, many people could see this videos.

gamelordofdeath said:
I don't know if I want. I am scared that modders will steal my profits. They release assets for free, people play game longer without paying me. And the mods compete with the game sequels or DLCs. People can play my game with mods for 1000 hours while paying me only a single time. If my game won't have mods, people will have to buy sequels and DLCs from me and I will earn more money. Mods are stealing my profits.

Allow modders to replace selected content, but prevent them from adding content. So they can make the boss monster Hitler with boobs, but they can not add new levels or change existing ones.

gamelordofdeath said:
If my game won't have mods, people will have to buy sequels and DLCs from me and I will earn more money. Mods are stealing my profits.

How are the stealing your profits, anymore than any other game-developer that is making a better game than you? I gotta say, I really don't like the way you talk. “Stealing” your profits by making free mods… people “have to” buy your DLC when you take away others people ability to create free content… This is the type of nonesense that's usually spout by AAA companies to justify anti-consumer tacticts.

Here's how you get people to buy your games: Make good games. Mods enhance the experience for many people playing games, thus will make it more likely to buy more from you. That's way more effective than trying to strongarm people into buying by taking away alternatives. If you are afraid that your DLCs cannot compete with mods, then you've got a problem there. If you, as a developer who is intending to earn their living from the game you make (presumably), and you cannot make a DLC that's higher quality and scope than a few nerds shitting in a bucket in their home in their free times (so your DLCs have no additional value over free mods), then your game has no chance of succedding anyway.

So my advice: Stop treating your customers like criminals. Make a good game, build goodwill and get a loyal fan community, than you can sell DLCs and sequels and all. Or you could proceed with your attitidue towards your players, go full anti-consumer, spend needless time and money on encryption, add always-online/denuvo anti-tamper that fucks with users PCs, add a few micro-transactions for QoL or even better player power (because why not get a few more dollars to make up for all the mean people still stealing your assets and all those leeches who might play through the game more than once without paying you twice), and end up without any customers at all. Choice is yours.

gamelordofdeath said:
I am scared that modders will steal my profits.

Just like your other post about business development, you've somehow embraced the idea that the business is zero sum. If others are succeeding it comes at a cost to you. This is false.

Modders generally enlarge the community. More people play, more people get engaged, more people find their personal niche, more people buy your products. Games that attract modders are generally successful, and good mods trigger a boost in popularity and therefore sales. Even during the long tail long after most sales have dried up, a new mod can trigger another small wave of sales as word spreads and people discover or rediscover the product.

JoeJ said:
Allow modders to replace selected content, but prevent them from adding content. So they can make the boss monster Hitler with boobs, but they can not add new levels or change existing ones.

This is something I will consider.

Juliean said:
How are the stealing your profits, anymore than any other game-developer that is making a better game than you? I gotta say, I really don't like the way you talk. “Stealing” your profits by making free mods… people “have to” buy your DLC when you take away others people ability to create free content… This is the type of nonesense that's usually spout by AAA companies to justify anti-consumer tacticts.

Why would people buy DLC or sequel for my game when they can download free mod that gives huge new map and 1000 missions? Mods compete with DLC. Mods are free, DLC cost money.

Juliean said:
anymore than any other game-developer that is making a better game than you?

Modders are worse than other game developers, because if other developer makes better game, people will have to pay him, while modders give products and their work for free. They ruin the market. They offer a product for free. A product based on your work (your game engine).

Juliean said:
If you, as a developer who is intending to earn their living from the game you make (presumably), and you cannot make a DLC that's higher quality and scope than a few nerds shitting in a bucket in their home in their free times (so your DLCs have no additional value over free mods), then your game has no chance of succedding anyway

I am also a nerd doing game in free time and I am only one while modders have a team.

Juliean said:
and end up without any customers at all

I don't see that in real life. Shady companies like Electronic Arts, Blizzard, Rockstar Games are doing record profits.

frob said:
Modders generally enlarge the community. More people play, more people get engaged, more people find their personal niche, more people buy your products. Games that attract modders are generally successful, and good mods trigger a boost in popularity and therefore sales.

I realize this. This is a good effect of modding, but there is also bad effect, that mods compete with sequels and DLCs. I don't know which effect is stronger. And what kind of modding should I allow.

gamelordofdeath said:
I am also a nerd doing game in free time and I am only one while modders have a team.

So you think everybody has a team, just you have not?
And everybody makes millions, just you don't? Or if so, others would take the bigger cut?

Like others, i think you have the wrong attitude. This is how i think about it:
In case your game is so successful that modders will work on it, and eventually earn some money with it,
or in case some streamers stream your game up and down, earning even more…
Then you made it.
And only then, you might eventually want to worry about others taking profit from your work. But likely you want need to.

I’m at the beginning stages of making a game. From the start, it has been open source, and not only that, the game comes with a built in editor. You’ll basically be able to make any kind of action-RPG you want, from scratch, or just mod our game. Mods get people coding, which is the whole point.