In a separate slide that’s explained a little more fully, the company adds that the impact of mods on their reputation isn’t just the result of someone stripping Leon Kennedy down to his knickers. Players who install mods only to suffer performance problems such as crashes, freezing or save data corruption can end up turning to Capcom for support, which can then eat up workload and development budget that might otherwise be spent on creating higher-quality games.
This sounds like a load of corporate bullshit that they're going to use to justify preventing modding of their games.
Actually, no.
While it’s hard to imagine anyone finding goofy mods swapping cartoon characters or kids’ TV characters for grisly monsters all that scandalous - something that Capcom seems to recognise by acknowledging that “the majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game”
Why are you intentionally leaving out the rest of that sentence?
it’s apparently nevertheless a concern that some mods might be deemed offensive in a way that requires tighter controls on modding.
They are specifically talking about restricting modding.
Goddamn. What a shady move. I expect it from the media and shit by for some reason it stings more when a rando does it.
Restricting, not preventing like you said.
Oh yes, because everyone knows. They say one thing it totally won't morph into something new afterwards. Also how do you imagine they will "restrict" the modding? By making the game more tamperproof and harder to mod. So while it may not be "prevented" they will basically make the only mods around texture swaps or some shit.
They probably spend fractions of a percent of their profits on moderation. We're talking like 0.01%. Half the time it's cycling college grads through 18 month contracts that they terminate so they can pay them less and less each time (Source: Worked at Microsoft, and they're infamous for this. Hell, QA for Microsoft's game division make about 50 cents above minimum wage in BC.)
I've worked in software support for a decade and saying "We can't support you because you modified this" is pretty standard. And with automated replies they don't take too much support time.
You could even automate that entire process.
Require customers to email support, require a log file, have your log files show if mods are installed, auto reply that the customer should reinstall the game without mods and see if the issue persists.
If you want to get really snarky, figure out who wrote the mods and cc them on the reply saying "For your convenience we have included the authors of the installed mods on this email so you can work with them to resolve your issue."
Yeah that logic on their part is horseshit, anyone savvy enough to mod a game that isn't mod friendly knows that if they have instability that's on them for modding in the first place. All the times I completely hosed my Skyrim install with mods, or my Cities: Skylines install with mods, I never once thought about contacting the game maker for support. So to act like across the board modding will cause a flood of support requests is dishonest.
I killed my Cyberpunk game trying to mod it. I just changed the installation directory, re-download, and loaded from cloud save when I got sick of trying to fix it. It's so easy to recover from stuff like that nowadays.
Exactly, if you hose your self, uninstall, delete the folder entirely and redownload. It's a cope out to point to mods as increasing demands for technical support. If handled right modding can breath longevity and extra interest in your games. Shit, some of the most popular games on the market started out as mods originally.
Tone deaf companies will continue missing the point.
Then just impliment some automatic message before anyone in support is contacted. Something like "If you installed mods in your game, the first step is to uninstall them. If it still works, reinstall the game. If it's still not working after that, THEN we'll help"
Maybe worded a little more professionally, but just an automatic trouble-shooting message that's gonna be every support person's first response anyway
The Sims 4 have a support message like that. I have no idea how much it helps but God knows it is desperately needed.
Gee capcom. Got any hard evidence that people who install mods are going to you for help?
Look at the Sims 4 support website, is a good start to see that a lot of people will 100% ask questions like, " Completely moded action, has a bug. How to fix it? I don't play with any mods I promise."
So personally I don't have any higher hopes for the Capcom audience, but credit to EA at least they just shrug their shoulders and answer " First completely remove your mods, clean the cache files and repair the game"
This might be an issue, however:
This sounds like a load of corporate bullshit that they're going to use to justify preventing modding of their games.
Actually, no.
Why are you intentionally leaving out the rest of that sentence?
They are specifically talking about restricting modding.
Goddamn. What a shady move. I expect it from the media and shit by for some reason it stings more when a rando does it.
Restricting, not preventing like you said.
Oh yes, because everyone knows. They say one thing it totally won't morph into something new afterwards. Also how do you imagine they will "restrict" the modding? By making the game more tamperproof and harder to mod. So while it may not be "prevented" they will basically make the only mods around texture swaps or some shit.
They probably spend fractions of a percent of their profits on moderation. We're talking like 0.01%. Half the time it's cycling college grads through 18 month contracts that they terminate so they can pay them less and less each time (Source: Worked at Microsoft, and they're infamous for this. Hell, QA for Microsoft's game division make about 50 cents above minimum wage in BC.)
I've worked in software support for a decade and saying "We can't support you because you modified this" is pretty standard. And with automated replies they don't take too much support time.
You could even automate that entire process.
Require customers to email support, require a log file, have your log files show if mods are installed, auto reply that the customer should reinstall the game without mods and see if the issue persists.
If you want to get really snarky, figure out who wrote the mods and cc them on the reply saying "For your convenience we have included the authors of the installed mods on this email so you can work with them to resolve your issue."
Yeah that logic on their part is horseshit, anyone savvy enough to mod a game that isn't mod friendly knows that if they have instability that's on them for modding in the first place. All the times I completely hosed my Skyrim install with mods, or my Cities: Skylines install with mods, I never once thought about contacting the game maker for support. So to act like across the board modding will cause a flood of support requests is dishonest.
I killed my Cyberpunk game trying to mod it. I just changed the installation directory, re-download, and loaded from cloud save when I got sick of trying to fix it. It's so easy to recover from stuff like that nowadays.
Exactly, if you hose your self, uninstall, delete the folder entirely and redownload. It's a cope out to point to mods as increasing demands for technical support. If handled right modding can breath longevity and extra interest in your games. Shit, some of the most popular games on the market started out as mods originally.
Tone deaf companies will continue missing the point.
Then just impliment some automatic message before anyone in support is contacted. Something like "If you installed mods in your game, the first step is to uninstall them. If it still works, reinstall the game. If it's still not working after that, THEN we'll help"
Maybe worded a little more professionally, but just an automatic trouble-shooting message that's gonna be every support person's first response anyway
The Sims 4 have a support message like that. I have no idea how much it helps but God knows it is desperately needed.
Gee capcom. Got any hard evidence that people who install mods are going to you for help?
Look at the Sims 4 support website, is a good start to see that a lot of people will 100% ask questions like, " Completely moded action, has a bug. How to fix it? I don't play with any mods I promise."
So personally I don't have any higher hopes for the Capcom audience, but credit to EA at least they just shrug their shoulders and answer " First completely remove your mods, clean the cache files and repair the game"