We already have this, it's called a game engine. Godot does this fully, and Unity is company owned but offers a community store with its own ecosystem. Download one of them and start creating today! No company will hold you back.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Were you playing games through the late 90s and early 00s, by any chance? Because we've been here before. At least three of the most-played games on Steam right now came from mods.
Didnt the whole moba genre start as mod?
The third-most populated game on Steam right now is Dota 2. Dota 1 is a mod. Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. PUBG came from the designer of a Battle Royale mod for Arma.
Is LoL still the most popular game in the world?
Based off Dota
Almost certainly not, but it's probably not far down the list.
And Auto Chess genre came from a custom game in Dota 2
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Started as Warcraft 3 custom maps before Dota 1.
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Negative time, many games you know and love began as mods of other games.
Counter Strike, Warcraft 3 DotA, ARMA 3 PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Momentum Mod, ... All of these were mods that became so big they became their own games.
If you're strictly talking about platforms though, you need support from the original developers,or the source must be easily editable (like the minecraft java edition). At that point it becomes pretty common for huge mods to be made which eventually end up managing themselves. The problem is that you need a lot of money to actually make new feeling games. And developers can't easily ask for money for mods, so development time is quite limited.
I am talking even lower. Like a made for modding framework that is totally open source. And yeah, that means games will end up with a somewhat common look and feel. But a lot of games end up that way anyway after mods. I am not sure that players need tons of unique games. I think they want games that are comfortable and replayable. In many cases they just want to hang out with friends, and the game itself is almost a pretext. Fortnight is actually a decent example of that. It leaned into that with lots of events that weren't really much more than window dressing. But if it is completely opensource, you can end up with a ton of flavors to try and a lower learning curve for each.
Think you just described a game engine like Godot or Armory.
Ultimately that's what you are describing there with such a free-form framework. The tools to make anything.
Even at a higher level engines like RPG maker and twine exist within genres.
And that isn't a mod, so much as a game.
But going back to mods...
And why should that end up with a common look and feel? People have been modding the look and feel of games since the 90s.
Credentials: I made mods and maps in the 90s and commercial games in the 2000s.
Well, if you lower the barrier to entry. More people are likely to use the stock offerings. But that isn't really a plus. Ideally the games would be visually different. But if you have a simple mechanic like inventory, it could and should generally be similar to others, unless that is what is supposed to be different about your game. W, a, s, d at least is pretty standard now. But it wasn't always. I have noticed games solving the same problems as many other games, but doing it much worse. And clearly not by intention to be different, just because that wasn't thier focus. So for those cases, it would improve those games.
I disagree, rather strongly.
The evolution of gameplay comes from the diversity of design.
This occasionally enables games, of varying quality, to break with orthodoxy and to create new paradigms.
The two stick control method we use for FPS, for example, only happened because someone broke with convention when designing Alien Resurrection for the PS1.
It was absolutely planned at the time, but soon became the standard.
My point is that you don't know what needs to be improved until the alternatives appear.
So no, inventory should not confirm to a standard. It should be entirely driven by the aspirations of the designer and the needs of the game.
There will be times when games don't get it right, much like in biological evolution, there are mistakes and dead ends, but the only thing you really want to avoid is a monoculture.
What I was saying is that if they aren't intentionally breaking the standard, then there is no reason not to use the standard. But what I see is games that are focused on where they are trying to break the standard and be different (which they should) and then leaving basic functionality half assed. It's that half assed stuff that reduces the quality of the game, and also even though it was half assed, it still took dev time, and may even be a thorn in their side that they just never get to. Having off the shelf plugins for that kind of thing means they can focus on what they are innovating, and still produce a game that has decent polish in the other areas like inventory and such.
Ok, but you understand that even at a reasonably low level "plugins" exist for core functionality.
Libraries within code exist to make certain tasks standardised and easy to implement. Game engines abstract common requirements like level loading, control schemes, camera movement...
The point I'm repeatedly making is that these things already exist, and if a designer chooses to implement them one way or another, then I suspect they have a reason to.
No one sets out to make a half-assed game. Even the jank out there was probably a better idea at one point. But often that comes from hubris, not from a lack of "plugins".
Again, I used to do this as a job. I was pretty mediocre, but I did get to work with some amazing talent... And I think they'd back me up on this. Creating cm games isn't about standardisation, it is often about exploration. It is an art form as much as it is a technical process.
However, I highly recommend you give it a go yourself. GODOT is a great engine with a ton of functionality and plug ins as well as tutorials. Spend a week making a very simple game with very simple controls. Do the thing and report back. I promise I'll play it and I'll celebrate it with you.
I don’t work in games, but I do work in software. I do understand that there are already libraries and plugins. I am just talking about increasing the level of abstraction. An example of something I see in crafting games may help. So you go to craft something, and you are missing a component, but you are able to craft that too. In some games you can click on the missing component to go to the interface were you would craft it. But in most you have to go back to the crafting search and type in the name in a search bar then click on it in a list to do the same. This is a simple QOL thing. Further, after you crafted the component, a back arrow to take you back to what you were trying to craft originally would be nice. But you won't see that in 90% of crafting games. But you will find mods for this kind of thing. My assertion is that devs don't implement these sorts of things because they would rather spend thier time on the things that make their game different. So if this sort of thing was a plugin or what not, they wouldn't need to spend time on it, and the overall quality would go up. Plus people who want to make games today, but are overwhelmed by how much they would have to do that isn't related to the idea they have, my feel less overwhelmed, and we would get more games with more innovative ideas.
It's your assertion that "Devs don't implement these sort of things because they would rather spend their time on things that make their game different" that I disagree with.
That's just not how it is. Serious thoughts goes into the mundane stuff. The UI, especially.
It's been happening for years, almost decades at this point. In fact, I'd be willing to say that at least 50% of most games ever made were made by someone who used to mod other games for fun.
Most recently there's been Black Mesa, which is a fan remake of Half-Life in Half-Life 2's Source engine.
There's also The Forgotten City, which was actually a Skyrim mod first and was so popular the mod makers were approached by Microsoft to make their own game.
Most Source engine games are actually mods of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod.
My friend, I regret to inform you form you those are not recent releases.
Decades.
Team Fortress started as a mod for Quake 1(30 years ago)
Red Orchestra was the winner of the Make Something Unreal contest that Epic Games held over 20 years ago.
Famously, League of Legends and DOTA started as a custom map for Warcraft 3(Defense of the Ancients) and apparently Activision/Blizzard missed that window so much that they are a footnote in the genre they fucking started.
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to mod quake into dwarf fortress until I reread your comment.
Battlefield 2 was at least partly made by the team who made Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942
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Factorio was created because Kovorax didn't get a job at Minecraft...
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Ya'll talking about modded games, and no one mentioned Fallout London.
The developers got tired of waiting for Fallout 5 and made it themselves.
The existence of engines like Unity and Unreal blurs this a bit. You used to see more full-conversion mods for games that make them into something else, because the engine was the hard part. Now that they’re available on very permissive terms, most hobbyist game devs will genuinely make a full game from an empty kit, and release it without players needing to mod a game like Half-Life or Quake.
But, having full ownership of that environment naturally means a lot of creators will want something back for their work. They have no choice but to shrug and accept it’s a free fan project when it’s built off a $60 game, but the story is different when that chain is gone. So most of this trend takes the form of indie game development.
Dunno "rise", but certainly isn't unprecedented for mods or similar to get standalone releases. Black Mesa and UNLOVED both come to mind.
And if we stretch definition a little, to my knowledge, Super Bernie World, Luanti, and apparently now S&Box all allow being used as engines for making mods as standalone games.
Honestly, this is how I wish more of my favorite IPs would go. Elder scrolls and fallout especially, Bethesda couldn't write a story for a bad porno, let alone compete with some of the story mods in Fallout 4 and skyrim. Just streamline the developer tools into an easy to access plug and play system for mods and quit trying to sell us a $40 knock off of an existing mod on nexus.
I'm not exactly sure if this is what you mean, but I have a couple examples of fantastic community powered fan games that arguably eclipse their inspiration.
Pokemon Infinite Fusion: fan powered remake of Pokemon Fire Red that incorporates a fusion mechanic and has something like 600,000 high quality fan created sprites. They're now working on a version for Pokemon Emerald
Clone Hero: fan made guitar hero/rockband clone with support for tons of peripherals including drums and vocals, with a huge library of fan generated songs.
Well, I started playing Skyrim about 3 years ago, and I now have over 200 mods. It's almost as high quality graphics and sound as modern games, plus I have a huge choice of scenarios I can install. Wild stuff.
Cyberpunk 2077 might be next for me, unless I decide to play skyblivion!
Some have already tried that. There are some games where there's basically zero base game and the devs want the players to fill in the content. Since such games start out with nothing, no one makes mods for them, and so the games die in obscurity. Ever hear of S&box?
That said, the people behind RPGMaker have a lot of this covered. They provide a good stock of assets to let people build stuff out of the box. This lets people create content quick, which eventually brings in the people that know what they're doing, which results in good stuff.
I remember that Microsoft "sandbox" dev environment. That went nowhere.
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