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Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game
Modifications
Daniel Lee ·Dayi Lin ·Cor-Paul Bezemer ·
Ahmed E. Hassan
Received: date / Accepted: date
Abstract Prior work has shown that gamer loyalty is important for the sales of a de-
veloper’s future games. Therefore, it is important for game developers to increase the
longevity of their games. However, game developers cannot always meet the growing
and changing needs of the gaming community, due to the often already overloaded
schedules of developers. So-called modders can potentially assist game developers
with addressing gamers’ needs. Modders are enthusiasts who provide modifications
or completely new content for a game. By supporting modders, game developers can
meet the rapidly growing and varying needs of their gamer base. Modders have the
potential to play a role in extending the life expectancy of a game, thereby saving
game developers time and money, and leading to a better overall gaming experience
for their gamer base.
In this paper, we empirically study the metadata of 9,521 mods that were extracted
from the Nexus Mods distribution platform. The Nexus Mods distribution platform is
one of the largest mod distribution platforms for PC games at the time of our study.
The goal of our paper is to provide useful insights about mods on the Nexus Mods
distribution platform from a quantitative perspective, and to provide researchers a
solid foundation to further explore game mods. To better understand the potential of
mods to extend the longevity of a game we study their characteristics, and we study
their release schedules and post-release support (in terms of bug reports) as a proxy
for the willingness of the modding community to contribute to a game. We find that
Daniel Lee ·Dayi Lin ·Ahmed E. Hassan
Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL)
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON, Canada
E-mail: {dlee, dayi.lin, ahmed}@cs.queensu.ca
Cor-Paul Bezemer
Analytics of Software, Games and Repository Data (ASGAARD) Lab
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada
E-mail: bezemer@ualberta.ca
2 Daniel Lee et al.
providing official support for mods can be beneficial for the perceived quality of the
mods of a game: games for which a modding tool is provided by the original game
developer have a higher median endorsement ratio than mods for games that do not
have such a tool. In addition, mod users are willing to submit bug reports for a mod.
However, they often fail to do this in a systematic manner using the bug reporting tool
of the Nexus Mods platform, resulting in low-quality bug reports which are difficult
to resolve.
Our findings give the first insights into the characteristics, release schedule and
post-release support of game mods. Our findings show that some games have a very
active modding community, which contributes to those games through mods. Based
on our findings, we recommend that game developers who desire an active modding
community for their own games provide the modding community with an officially-
supported modding tool. In addition, we recommend that mod distribution platforms,
such as Nexus Mods, improve their bug reporting system to receive higher quality
bug reports.
Keywords gaming ·game development ·Nexus Mods
1 Introduction
The gaming industry keeps on growing at a rapid pace. The Global Games Market
projected that 2.3 billion gamers would spend $137.9 billion USD on digital games
in 2018, representing a 13% increase from 2017 [62]. Because of the scale of the
gaming industry, and the fact that gamers are extremely hard to please [12], it has
become challenging, and often costly, to develop a successful game. One strategy
that has proven to be profitable for game developers is to increase gamer retention,
e.g., by striving to keep current players playing a game. Prior work [45] shows that
long time-players of a game are more likely to buy the future games of the same
developer. Hence, gamer loyalty is an important aspect for game developers.
However, keeping up with the changing needs of gamers is hard, which makes
maintaining gamer loyalty difficult as well. The increasing gamer expectations and
rising development cost are increasing the pressure on game development teams [27].
Developers need to balance their available resources between working on a new(er)
game, maintenance updates of an older game, and updates (such as new game levels)
that are desired by the players of that game. Hence, the tradeoff between increasing
the longevity of an older game and working on a newer game is a challenging tradeoff
for game developers.
For some games the gaming community itself extends a helping hand with in-
creasing the longevity of the game. Game modding is the practice of modifying an
existing game through game mods [53]. Game modders are external developers or
game enthusiasts who make modifications to an existing game, because they enjoy or
want to improve the original game. Game mods allow an original game to remain re-
playable for longer than it was originally intended to, as the mods add new or updated
content to the game. For example, the Skyrim game1continues to receive new content
1https://elderscrolls.bethesda.net/en/skyrim
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 3
six years after its initial release thanks to modders [5]. Thus, game modding can help
alleviate the pressure on game developers of having to provide new game content. In
some extreme cases, such new game content can even lead to a new standalone game.
For example, the Defense of the ancients (Dota) game series2originated as a mod for
the Warcraft 3 game,3and then became a standalone game due to its popularity. The
Dota 2 game still has an average of approximately 450k players every day, more than
5 years after its initial release and more than 16 years after the release of the Warcraft
3game [58].
In this paper, we study 9,521 mods of the 20 most-modded games on the Nexus
Mods distribution platform,4one of the largest online distribution platforms for game
mods. Our goal is to provide insights into the modding community of the Nexus Mods
distribution platform from a quantitative perspective, and to provide researchers with
a solid foundation for future exploration of game mods. In doing so, game developers
can potentially reduce development time and cost due to the increased replayabil-
ity of their games through mods. We compare the mods on the Nexus Mods distri-
bution platform along three dimensions: (1) media (e.g., visual improvements) and
non-media mods (e.g., complete overhauls), (2) mods with and without official mod-
ding support from the game developer, and (3) mods for Bethesda and non-Bethesda
games (as the Bethesda game studio is known to be very supportive towards mod-
ders). Overall, we want to study the characteristics of popular mods, and we want to
investigate how these mods are maintained.
We first conduct a preliminary study to understand the type of mods that are
created by modders. We observed that games with a better modding support from the
original game developers (e.g., through an official modding tool or API) tend to have
a more active modding community. An important feature of software distribution
platforms (including those for game mods) is to ease the deployment of software
releases. Our paper focuses on two aspects related to game mod releases: their release
schedules and the post-release support. Both these aspects are well-studied by other
software engineering researchers for other types of distribution platforms (such as
mobile app stores [22,23,60] or game distribution platforms [35,36]). We address
the following two research questions (RQs):
RQ1: What is the release schedule of mods? A mod has a median of two releases,
which are often made closely after each other. Providing an officially-supported
modding tool for a game is associated with mods being released faster, in particu-
lar when that tool is available for several games within (or even across) the game
franchise.
RQ2: How well is the post-release support of mods? In general, bug reports for
mods are of low quality. A very small portion (approximately 2 to 4%) of the
bug reports contain a code sample or a stack trace. Hence, it is not surprising that
67% of the bug reports still have the ‘New issue’ status. Most bug reports are
discussed only by the bug reporter and mod developer. However, we came across
many informal bug reports outside of the official bug reporting tool. Hence, users
2https://www.dota2.com/play/
3http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/war3/
4https://www.nexusmods.com/
4 Daniel Lee et al.
are willing to submit bug reports, but they fail to do so in a systematic manner,
which leads to low quality bug reports.
The remainder of the paper is outlined as follows. Section 2gives background in-
formation about the Nexus Mods distribution platform. Section 3gives an overview
of related work. Section 4discusses our methodology. Section 5discuss our prelim-
inary study of the characteristics of mods. Sections 6and 7discuss the results of
our empirical study. Section 8discusses the implications of our study. Section 9dis-
cusses the research challenges that we identified for future researchers of game mods.
Section 10 outlines threats to the validity of our findings. Section 11 concludes our
study.
2 The Nexus Mods Distribution Platform
This section gives a brief overview of the Nexus Mods distribution platform. The
Nexus Mods distribution platform is one of the largest distribution platforms for game
mods with over 230,000 downloadable mods [16]. Table 1shows a comparison of the
number of mods on other popular distribution platforms for mods. All mods on the
Nexus Mods distribution platform are free to download. Each mod has a publisher
and a creator: the mod publisher is the user who uploaded or distributed the mod and
the mod creator is a self-defined name by the mod publisher. Hence, the creator data
does not necessarily reflect the actual creator of the mod. Based on our observation,
the mod creator data is noisy since it is self-defined; e.g., the mod creator name “me”
is frequently specified as the mod creator. Therefore, we refer to the mod publisher as
the modder in the remainder of this paper. In some cases, the mod was published by
the original game developer. For example, the CD Projekt Red game studio published
their MODKit for the Witcher 3 game through the Nexus Mods platform [9].
The Nexus Mods distribution platform has a community of over 14 million regis-
tered users. Mod developers can distribute their mods through Nexus Mods, but also
upload new releases of their mods (along with release notes). In addition, the Nexus
Mods distribution platform offers its own simple bug reporting system,5which allows
users who downloaded a mod to report a bug for that mod. Mod developers have the
option to enable or disable the bug reporting system on their mod’s webpage. Each
user has the option to add a title and a description, and the choice of making the report
private. In addition, there are four bug report statuses on the Nexus Mods distribution
platform that we consider to be open (i.e., new issue,being looked at,known issue,
and needs more info), whereas we consider the other statuses (i.e., fixed,not a bug,
won’t fix, and duplicate) as resolved statuses.
Each mod has a dedicated mod page, which displays metadata such as the mod ti-
tle, mod publisher, mod category, the number of endorsements, the number of unique
downloads, and the files of the mod. In addition, the mod page can include a detailed
description, images or videos, forum posts, mod statistics and bug reports. Endorse-
ments6are the Nexus Mods distribution platform’s version of a rating and represents
5https://www.nexusmods.com/news/12474
6https://help.nexusmods.com/article/45-what- are-file- endorsements
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 5
Table 1: Online Mod Distribution Platforms Overview
Mod Distribution Platforms # of Mods
Nexus Mods 230,581
Game Modding171,262
Moddb218,293
Mods Online34,766
1http://www.gamemodding.net/
2https://www.moddb.com/
3http://modsonline.com/
the user’s appreciation of the mod. An endorsement can be considered an ‘upvote’ of
the associated mod. Nexus Mods does not provide a mechanism for giving a negative
endorsement (other than removing a prior endorsement of the mod). Endorsements
help other users find useful or enjoyable mods, but does not necessarily reflect the
quality of the mod. In order to provide an endorsement, the mod must be downloaded
first.
3 Related Work
This section discusses work that is related to our study. We discuss work on (1) game
modding, (2) games and software engineering and (3) mining online distribution plat-
forms.
Game Modding: The majority of prior work on game modding focused on the
cultural, social and economical aspects of modding. For example, several studies fo-
cused on the types of mods that exist and the motivations of developers and play-
ers for modding and using mods [10,24,31,48,57]. In addition, several studies
investigated the relation and mutual benefits between a game and its mod develop-
ers [4,17,26,43,56]. Poretski and Arazy [47] conducted an empirical study on 64
games from the Nexus Mods distribution platform and found value in mods with
respect to an increase in sales of the original game.
There are relatively few studies on game modding from a software engineering
perspective. Dey et al. [16] studied the mod-popularity of features in the 6 most-
modded games on the Nexus Mods distribution platform by looking at the number
of unique downloads and associated tags with each mod. They found that untagged
mods are the least popular. Scacchi [51–53] gives an overview of the types of mods
and the modding community, and describes modding as an open source approach to
extending closed source software. We are the first to conduct a large-scale study of
the release schedule and bug reports of game mods.
Games and Software Engineering: Several studies focused on games and soft-
ware engineering. Several studies mined data from game projects to study software
engineering aspects. For example, Ahmed et al. [1] and Pascarella et al. [44] analyzed
open source game projects. Graham and Roberts [19] and K¨
ohler et al. [29] studied
6 Daniel Lee et al.
the development of their own game, whereas Guana et al. [20] studied the develop-
ment of their own game engine. B´
ecares et al. [6] studied the gameplay of a small
game called Time and Space. In addition, several studies [34,37] investigated what
can be learned from bug videos.
Other studies investigated software engineering aspects by mining data from on-
line game distribution platforms. Lin et al. studied the impact of the early access
release model [36], emergency updates [35] and reviews [38] of games on the Steam
online distribution platform. Cheung et al. [13] analyzed over 200 reviews for Xbox
360 games.
A few prior studies mined data from game literature (such as articles and mag-
azines). For example, several studies [33,46,61] mined post-mortems of games for
insights about what went wrong and what went right during the game development.
Scacchi and Cooper [54] studied literature on computer games and software engi-
neering. In addition, Ampatzoglou and Stamelos [2] systematically reviewed existing
literature on software engineering for games.
A few prior studies studied game development through interviews [15,42] and
surveys [28,30].
The above studies focused on several aspects of games and software engineering,
such as software engineering practices applied in game development [19,20,28,44,
46,61], limitations of game development [1,30,42], game testing [6,29], empirical
insights on game development for game developers [34–38], user views of games [13,
15], and potential software engineering research opportunities in games [2,33,54].
The above papers on games and software engineering all focus on the develop-
ment of the original game. In contrast, our paper focuses on the development of game
mods. Since the development teams of game mods and original games are likely
considerably different (e.g., most original games are developed by large companies,
while mods are often developed by individuals), our paper is the first work to explore
this very important complementary community given that game mods are likely a
very different type of software than games.
Mining Online Distribution Platforms: Studies on mining large game distribution
platforms focused mostly on the Steam distribution platform. The work of Lin et
al. [35–38] (described above) mined the Steam platform from a software engineering
point of view. Sifa et al. [55] analyzed the playtime of 6 million users on the Steam
platform and observed that there were fundamental principles regarding playtime.
Blackburn et al. [8] studied cheaters in the Steam gaming community and observed
that the player’s network of friends impacted the likelihood of a player becoming a
cheater.
The large body of prior work on mobile app analysis focused mostly on the
Google Play store and Apple’s App Store. As a complete overview of prior work
in this field is outside of the scope of this paper, we refer to the survey of Martin et
al. [40] for such an overview. Several studies focused on release schedules of mobile
apps. Hassan et al. [22] studied the frequency of emergency updates, and found eight
patterns of emergency releases. In addition, Hassan et al. [23] showed that it is impor-
tant to study mobile app reviews at the release-level rather than at the update-level.
McIlroy et al. [41] studied the update frequency in 10,713 mobile apps that were
mined from the Google Play store and observed that only a small subset of the apps
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 7
Nexus
Mods Extract mods
Collecting Basic Mod Information
230,581
mods
9,521
mods
Filter out mods
with less than
or equal to
1,000
endorsements
Download
main files
Filtering Mod Population
1,836,802
files
Downloading File Contents
Preliminary Study of
Mods (Section 5)
Release Schedule of
Mods (Section 6.1)
Post-Release Support
of Mods (Section 6.2)
Extract bug
reports
Collecting Bug Reports
35,678
bug
reports
Filter by mods
in the top 20
games based
on the number
of mods
Unzip main
files
Fig. 1: An overview of our methodology.
were updated more than once a week, and that 45% of the updates did not provide a
rationale for the update.
4 Methodology
This section discusses the methodology of our empirical study of game mods. Fig-
ure 1presents the steps of our methodology. In addition, our dataset is available in
the supplementary material of our paper [32].
4.1 Collecting Basic Mod Information
We extracted 230,581 mods from the Nexus Mods distribution platform using a cus-
tomized crawler on January 29, 2018. The mod metadata that we used in our study
consists of the mod title, mod category, mod file size, mod files, total number of en-
dorsements, total number of unique downloads, and the total number of bug reports.
4.2 Filtering Unpopular Mods
We observed that there are many mods on the Nexus Mods platform which do not
work or are not used by anyone. As such mods are not representative of the mods that
are potentially helpful to game developers, we studied only a subset of the collected
mods. We had the following selection criteria for the studied mods:
– Quality: The mod is of reasonable quality.
– Popularity: The mod has a large community. Hence, such a mod would reflect
what gamers would like to see in a game.
8 Daniel Lee et al.
Table 2: An overview of the studied mods.
Total number of mods 230,581
Number of studied mods 9,521
Total number of games 502
Number of studied games 20
Number of studied mods with files 9,370
Number of studied files 1,836,802
Number of studied bug reports 35,678
Number of studied bug comments 109,133
The first criteria is satisfied by selecting mods that do not only have a large com-
munity, but are also widely appreciated (i.e., at least 1,000 endorsements). The second
criteria is satisfied by selecting only mods from the top 20 most-modded games on
Nexus Mods, which left us with a total of 9,521 mods. This criterion ensures that our
findings are not biased towards unpopular games with a small number of mods. Ta-
ble 2gives an overview of the studied mods. Table 3gives an overview of the studied
games and their number of mods.
4.3 Collecting Bug Reports
As explained in Section 2, the bug reporting system of the Nexus Mods distribution
platform only supports bug reports. As Table 8shows there exists a bug status “Not
a bug” in the Nexus Mods bug reporting system. We assume that mod developers
leverage this bug status to filter out reports that do not discuss a bug but for example,
request a feature. Hence, we assume that all bug reports without this status discuss
actual bugs. We collected the bug report metadata of each studied mod. In total, we
collected 35,678 bug reports for 2,160 out of the 9,521 studied mods. At the time
of crawling, the publishers of the remaining 7,361 mods explicitly disabled the bug
reporting functionality. In addition, we collected the comments on each studied bug
report. The total number of collected bug comments is 109,133.
4.4 Determining Whether a Game has Official Modding Support
We determined if the original game developers provided modding support for a game
by manually searching various sources, such as the game’s official website, to find
whether the original game developers released a modding tool. We identified an offi-
cial modding tool for 65% of the studied games.
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 9
Table 3: Our studied games (sorted by the number of mods).
Game Title Year of Release # of Mods Game Genre1Game Developer
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim22011 4,793 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
Fallout 4 2015 1,675 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
Fallout: New Vegas 2010 974 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition22016 518 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion22006 442 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
Fallout 3 2008 387 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
Dragon Age 2009 224 Action role-playing BioWare
The Witcher 3 2015 140 Action role-playing CD Projekt Red
Dragon Age: Inquisition 2014 76 Action role-playing BioWare
The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind22002 65 Action role-playing Bethesda Game Studios
Dragon Age 2 2011 35 Action role-playing BioWare
Dark Souls 2011 33 Action role-playing FromSoftware
The Witcher 2 2011 27 Action role-playing CD Projekt Red
Stardew Valley 2016 23 Simulation ConcernedApe
Mass Effect 3 2012 23 Action role-playing BioWare
Mount & Blade: Warband 2010 21 Action role-playing TaleWorlds Entertainment
XCOM 2 2016 20 Turn-based tactics Firaxis Games
State of Decay 2013 16 Action-adventure Undead Labs
The Witcher 2007 15 Action role-playing CD Projekt Red
XCOM: Enemy Unknown 2012 14 Turn-based tactics Firaxis Games
1The game genre was obtained from Wikipedia
2Skyrim/Skyrim SE/Oblivion/Morrowind hereafter
4.5 Downloading File Contents and Identifying Release Dates
The Nexus Mods platform hosts files in several categories for each mod. We collected
files from the following categories:
– Main files: These files are the base files of the latest version of a mod and usu-
ally come as a compressed archive. We used these files to study the file types that
are modified or added by a mod. After downloading and decompressing the main
files, we used the File7program to automatically classify the file type of each
decompressed file. Note that it is not sufficient to simply do the file type classi-
fication based on the file extension, as we observed that different games might
use the same extension for different file types. We automatically classified the file
type of 1,836,802 files.
– Update files and old files: These files are older versions of the main files. We
used the release dates of these files to identify the release schedule of a mod.
4.6 The Studied Dimensions of Mods
We study game mods along the following three dimensions:
1. Games with and without official modding support. While some games try to
prevent modding (e.g., multiplayer games to avoid cheating), other games provide
official modding support. Games with official modding support (e.g., through a
7https://linux.die.net/man/1/file
10 Daniel Lee et al.
0 20 40 60 80 100
Percentage of media files per studied mod
Fig. 2: The percentage of media files in each studied mod. The black vertical line
shows the median value.
tool or an API that is provided by the game’s developer) may make it easier to
develop and maintain mods, which could promote an active modding community.
Table 4gives an overview of the official modding tools of the studied games.
We studied 9,315 mods of games with official modding support and 206 mods of
games without official modding support.
2. Media and non-media mods. Media mods (e.g., mods that change the look-
and-feel of a game) require less programming effort than non-media mods (e.g.,
mods that change the gameplay of a game) [49]. Our hypothesis is that non-media
mods are harder to create and maintain. The following explains our approach to
distinguish between media and non-media mods:
(a) We collected 140 distinct file types from the studied mods. We removed file
types that took up less than 1% of the total files to remove the bias of in-
frequently used file types, leaving 37 distinct file types. We calculated the
percentage of files of each file type within each studied game.
(b) The first and third author independently categorized the 37 file types into
high-level file categories. Table 5shows the file types that reside in each file
category. The process of grouping the file types was straight-forward because
each file type had a distinct functionality. However, we did merge the audio
and video file types together into a multimedia file category. After consoli-
dating their categorization and resolving the conflicts, we ended up with 8
high-level file categories (archive, font, binary, source code, text/documenta-
tion, multimedia, image, and game data).
(c) We then categorized each file in the image, font, archive, text/documentation,
and multimedia file categories as a media file. We categorized each file in the
binary, source code, or game data file categories as a non-media file.
(d) Figure 2shows the distribution of the percentage of media files in the studied
mods. While there appears to be a natural cutoff at approximately 95% media
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 11
Table 4: An overview of the official modding tools of the studied games, sorted by
the total number of mods.
Game Title Official Tool Official URL
Skyrim Creation Kit https://www.creationkit.com/
Fallout 4 Creation Kit https://www.creationkit.com/
Fallout: New Vegas GECK https://geck.bethsoft.com/
Skyrim Special Edition Creation Kit https://www.creationkit.com/
Oblivion Construction Set https://cs.elderscrolls.com
Fallout 3 GECK https://geck.bethsoft.com/
Dragon Age Toolset http://www.datoolset.net/
The Witcher 3 MODKit https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/3173
Dragon Age: Inquisition - - -
Morrowind Construction Set https://cs.elderscrolls.com
Dragon Age 2 Toolset http://www.datoolset.net/
Dark Souls - -
The Witcher 2 REDKit https://redkitwiki.cdprojektred.com/REDkit
Stardew Valley - -
Mass Effect 3 - -
Mount & Blade: Warband - -
XCOM 2 Modbuddy -
State of Decay - -
The Witcher D’jinni -
XCOM: Enemy Unknown - -
files, this cutoff would introduce bias for mods with a small number of files.
We calculated that 57% of the studied mods have atmost 20 files. Hence, we
used thresholds that are based on the number of files to accurately determine
if a mod is a media or non-media mod. If the percentage of media files in a
mod is larger than the threshold for the number of files in the mod, the mod
is categorized as a media mod. Otherwise, the mod is categorized as a non-
media mod. We used the following thresholds:
Media mod thresholds =
>95%,if # of files ≥20.
>90%,if 20 ># of files ≥10.
># of files −1
# of files if # of files <10.
We studied 1,348 media mods and 8,145 non-media mods.
3. Mods of Bethesda and non-Bethesda games. Table 3shows that 7 of the 20
studied games were produced by Bethesda Game Studios (hereafter Bethesda).
Comparing mods of Bethesda games with mods of non-Bethesda games can yield
interesting insights into why Bethesda games have such active modding commu-
nities. We studied 8,829 mods of Bethesda games and 664 mods of non-Bethesda
games.
Throughout our study, we used the Wilcoxon test to assess whether the two groups
within each of the abovementioned dimensions differ significantly. The Wilcoxon
rank-sum test is an unpaired, non-parametric statistical test, where the null hypoth-
esis is that two distributions are identical, while the Wilcoxon signed-rank test is a
12 Daniel Lee et al.
Table 5: An overview of the file categories and the included file types (sorted alpha-
betically).
File Category File Types
Archive RAR archive data
Binary PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386
PE32 executable (DLL) (console) Intel 80386
PE32 executable (DLL) (console) Intel 80386 Mono/.Net assembly
PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386
PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386 Mono/.Net assembly
PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386
PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386 Mono/.Net assembly
Font TrueType font data
Game Data Data
Gamebryo game engine file
MSVC program database ver 7.00
NetImmerse game engine file
Unreal Engine Package
XML 1.0 document text
Image JPEG image data
Microsoft DirectDraw Surface (DDS)
PC bitmap
PNG image data
Targa image data - RGB 8 x 8 x 24 Targa image data - RGB 8 x 8 x 24
Targa image data - RGBA - RLE 32 x 32 x 32 - 8-bit alpha
Multimedia Audio file with ID3 version 2.3.0
Bink Video rev.i
MPEG ADTS
Ogg data
RIFF (little-endian) data
Source Code Algol 68 source text
C program text
C++ source text
Python script text executable
Text/Documentation ASCII text
HTML document text
ISO-8859 text
Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text
Unified diff output text
UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text
UTF-8 Unicode text
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 13
Table 6: The definitions of the mod categories (sorted alphabetically).
Mod Category Definition # of studied mods
Appearance Alters the visual features, such as the body, face, 283
and hair of the character
Audio Alters the game audio 138
Bug Fixes Fixes a bug in the game 240
Character Alters playable and non-playable 873
characters in the game
Cheats Alters the gameplay in an illegal or unjust manner 202
Game Items Adds or alters objects that a player can collect 2,250
or use in the game
Game Visuals Alters the observable experience of the game environment 1,749
Gameplay Alters the player experience and interaction 1,498
within the domain of the game rules
Overhaul Total conversion of certain game features or the full game 140
Performance Optimizes the game to improve performance 11
Save Starts the player in a specific state in the game 15
Story Adds to or alters the storyline of the game 194
User Interface Adds to or alters the interface of the game 296
Utility Tool that helps modders 307
World Object Adds or alters physical objects with which primary characters can 770
interact inside the game environment
paired non-parametric statistical test [63]. If the p-value of the applied Wilcoxon test
is less than 0.05, then the two distributions are significantly different under a signifi-
cance threshold of α= 0.05. To calculate the magnitude of the difference between the
two distributions, we compute Cliff’s delta d[39] effect size. We use the following
thresholds for d[50] :
Effect size =
negligible(N),if |d| ≤ 0.147.
small(S),if 0.147 <|d| ≤ 0.33.
medium(M),if 0.33 <|d| ≤ 0.474.
large(L),if 0.474 <|d| ≤ 1.
In the next sections, we discuss the results of our study. First we discuss our
preliminary study.
5 Preliminary Study of Mods from the Nexus Mods Distribution Platform
Prior research used the total number of unique downloads of a mod as a proxy for
its popularity [16]. However, a download does not necessarily mean that a gamer
enjoyed or played the mod. An endorsement is a better indication that a gamer has
played and appreciated the mod. Therefore, we studied the characteristics of highly
endorsed mods to gain a better understanding of the mods that are appreciated by the
modding community.
Approach: As the number of players can differ considerably for each game, we
normalized the number of endorsements by calculating the endorsement ratio and use
this ratio instead of the absolute number of endorsements:
14 Daniel Lee et al.
Game 1
Game 2
Game 3
Remaining 36
games
100 mods
100 mods
100 mods
452 mods
800 mods
Balanced
sample of 95
mods
Name Downsample
random
sample
random
sample
random
sample
total
1,252 mods
random
sample
Fig. 3: An overview of the creation of our balanced sample of mods.
endorsement ratio =
# of endorsements
# of unique downloads
To identify which type of mods are highly endorsed, we leveraged the publisher-
defined mod categories. As the definition of these mod categories appears not to be
moderated by Nexus Mods, the definitions contain a considerable amount of noise.
The first and third author independently manually created a high-level mod catego-
rization of the mod categories to group similar ones. For example, the mod categories
‘armour’ and ‘weapons’ were categorized as ‘game items’. The categorizations were
consolidated and conflicts were resolved through discussion. The cross-validation
process had a Cohen’s Kappa agreement of 0.93 (which is considered very high,
indicating a straightforward categorization task). Table 6shows the high-level mod
categories along with their definitions.
As the mod categories are defined by the mod publishers, we also wanted to val-
idate their accuracy. Therefore, we performed a sanity check in which we manually
verified for a balanced sample of 95 mods that the high-level category that we as-
signed to each of these mods fits their actual description. We validated a balanced
sample to avoid bias towards mods from games with a large number of mods. Fig-
ure 3shows how we created the balanced sample. Below we detail each step:
1. We select a random sample of 100 mods for each of the 8 games that have more
than 100 mods (800 mods in total).
2. We select all 452 mods of the remaining 36 studied games.
3. We combine the mods selected in step 1 and 2.
4. We randomly choose a statistically representative sample of 95 mods (which
yields a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 10).
After validating the sample of 95 mods, we found that the mod categorization
of 19 of the 95 mods was incorrect or unclear. In all cases, this error or unclarity
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 15
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4
Endorsement ratio per studied mod
No Modding Support
Modding Support
Fig. 4: The distribution of the endorsement ratios per studied mod with and without
official modding support. The black vertical lines are the median values.
was caused by the mod publisher. Hence, our high-level mod categorization is cor-
rect for approximately 80% of the mods. We did not assign a high-level category to
the categories of the 19 mods that were misclassified. In total, we assigned a high-
level category to 9,207 of the mods. In the rest of the paper, all analyses that were
performed on the high-level categories used only these 9,207 mods.
We used the Kruskal-Wallis test to study the differences between the median
endorsement ratios of the studied games across the high-level mod categories. The
Kruskal-Wallis test allows us to test whether the differences between more than 2
distributions are statistically significant.
Findings: Role-Playing Games (RPGs) are the most popular games for mod-
ding. Table 3gives an overview of the studied games, sorted by the number of mods
on Nexus Mods. 90% of the studied games belong to the Role-Playing Game genre.
A possible explanation is that RPGs often allow a player to customize their game
character (e.g., by earning new weapons or clothing for the game character). Hence,
players of RPGs may be more interested in customizing their game character beyond
the officially-supported options. Another possible explanation is that RPGs have a
longer playing time compared to games of other genres, which in turn motivates
players to customize their game character precisely as they wish. For example, the
mod-popular Skyrim and Fallout 4 games have an average playing time of respec-
tively 244.9 and 186.2 hours, whereas a non-RPG game such as the State of Decay
game has an average playing time of 25.7 hours [18]. A final observation is that the
vast majority of the studied games are mainly single-player games. A possible expla-
nation is that as players can benefit more considerably from cheating in multiplayer
games [14], the developers of such games take stricter measures to avoid modding.
Mods of games with official modding support have a higher endorsement
ratio than mods of games without official modding support. Figure 4shows that
16 Daniel Lee et al.
mods of games with official modding support have a median endorsement ratio of
0.08, whereas mods of games without official modding support have a median en-
dorsement ratio of 0.07. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test shows that the two distributions
are significantly different, with a small Cliff’s delta effect size. While the difference
between the endorsement ratios seems small, it is important to keep in mind that in
general, only a small fraction of the players of a game will actually provide a rating
or review of that game. For example, in our prior work [36], we showed that games
on the Steam platform have an average review ratio of 0.01. Hence, the difference
between endorsement ratios of 0.07 and 0.08 are relevant in practice. In addition, our
data shows that mods on the Nexus Mods distribution platform are endorsed more
often than that the original games are rated or reviewed on the Steam platform. We
are unable to find a statistically significant difference under the significance threshold
of α= 0.05 between the endorsement ratios of non-media and media mods, or be-
tween mods for non-Bethesda and Bethesda games. In addition, the Kruskal-Wallis
test shows that we are unable to find a statistically significant difference in the en-
dorsement ratio across mods from the different high-level categories.
The most-modded games are created by Bethesda. Table 3shows that Bethesda
created 7 games in the top 20 of most-modded games. A possible explanation is that
Bethesda has a very strong modding support, which is well known in the modding
community [11]. For example, Bethesda offers the Creation Kit modding tool. Ta-
ble 3shows that 73% of the studied mods are for the Skyrim,Skyrim Special Edition
and Fallout 4 games. A possible explanation for the mod-popularity of these games
is the existence of the Creation Kit [24]. A possible reason for the strong support
from Bethesda for the modding community is that Bethesda uses the modding com-
mmunity as a breeding ground for hiring new developers. For example, potential
level designers were asked during the interviewing process to create a mod using the
official tooling [17].
Role-Playing Games (RPGs) are the most mod-popular games. Mods of
games with official modding support are endorsed by gamers more often than
those of games without such support. Officially-supported modding tools are
leveraged by game developers during the hiring process of new developers
or designers.
6 RQ1: What is the Release Schedule of Mods?
Motivation: Mods are a contribution to the original game by the modding community.
Depending on the nature of a mod, it may require only one or several releases. For
example, a mod that improves a texture in a game may require only one release. On
the other hand, a mod that does a complete overhaul may require one or more follow-
up releases whenever its original game releases a new version. In this section, we
study the release schedules of the mods on the Nexus Mods platform. Assuming that
a mod requires more than one release, the release schedule of a mod is an indication
of the effort that a mod developer is willing to put into a mod. In addition, we study
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 17
Media
Non−media
Bethesda
Non−Bethesda
Official modding
support
No official modding
support
110 100
Number of releases per studied mod
Fig. 5: The distributions of the number of releases per mod across each studied di-
mension.
how long it takes mod developers to release a new version of the mod after the release
of a new version of the original game.
Approach: To capture the release schedule of a mod, we calculated the median
number of days between adjacent mod releases for each studied mod. To investigate
the release schedule of mods after official game updates and between adjacent mod
releases, we first manually collected the official release dates for each version of the
studied games from several sources, such as the original game’s website. We were
able to find official release dates for 80% of the studied games (8,804 mods). We
distinguish three release types for a mod:
– The initial mod release: The first release of the mod after the original game
release.
– A back-to-back mod release: A mod release that is adjacent in time to another
mod release without a game release in between. We assume that such a release is
to improve the previous mod release.
– A game-triggered mod release: A mod release that is adjacent in time to an
official game release, without another mod release in between. We assume that
such a release is to respond to the official game release.
In addition, we studied the time it took to release a mod for each of the games
from the The Witcher,Fallout,XCOM,Dragon Age and Skyrim game franchises. By
comparing the release times for mods from games from the same franchise, we can
study how official modding support (or its removal) for a game, or the official mod-
18 Daniel Lee et al.
Game−triggered release
Back−to−back release
Initial mod release
Median number of days between releases
0 9 99 999
Fig. 6: The distributions of the median number of days before a release for the three
types of mod releases.
ding tool is associated with the release time of a mod. We studied one game franchise
in which official modding support was added (the XCOM franchise), one in which of-
ficial modding support was removed (Dragon Age), two franchises (The Witcher and
Fallout) in which the officially-supported modding tool changed throughout the fran-
chise’s lifetime, and one franchise (Skyrim) in which the officially-supported mod-
ding tool did not change. To control for the difference in age between the games
within a game franchise, we focus on mods that were released within two years af-
ter the original game release. Because there were no mods in our data set for The
Witcher game that were released within the two-years time frame, we did not include
this game in our study of the release time of mods within a game franchise.
Findings: A mod has a median of two releases. Figure 5shows the number of
releases per mod across each studied dimension. The median number of releases is
two across each studied dimension except for the non-media mods and mods of games
without official modding support, which have a median of 3 releases. The Wilcoxon
rank-sum test shows that we are unable to find a statistically significant difference
under the significance threshold of α= 0.05 between the number of releases of mods
for games with and without official modding support. For the media and non-media
mods, the difference is significant but of negligible effect size. The finding for media
and non-media mods is surprising, as one would expect that non-media mods would
require more maintenance due to their closer relation with the original game’s source
code.
There is a much longer time period between an official game release and a
mod release, than between back-to-back mod releases. Figure 6shows the distri-
butions of the median number of days between releases for the three types of mod
release. We identified 9,478 initial mod releases, 32,207 back-to-back mod releases
and 26,400 game-triggered mod releases. Back-to-back releases are by far the fastest
releases, with a median of 3.5 days between releases. Since the median of the number
of mod releases is two, a possible explanation for the fast back-to-back releases is that
mod developers fine-tune (or fix) their mods based on feedback from the community.
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 19
It takes a median of 345.5 days before the initial version of a mod is released.
Figure 6shows that the majority of mods are released after more than 345.5 days.
These slow release times indicate that mod developers are either long-time players of
a game, or have renewed interest in the game after a long time. Either way, such a lag
in initial release indicates that mods are a way in which players of the game extend
the longevity of a game.
Performance mods are released approximately ten times faster than other
types of mods. Table 7shows the median number of days before a release for the
three types of mod releases across the studied mod categories. Performance mods are
released the fastest by far. However, we observed that performance mods are also the
least endorsed, with a median endorsement ratio of 0.06. We found that the 11 per-
formance mods in our data set are optimizations to improve the game’s frames per
second. However, several of these mods turned out to be counterproductive and ac-
tually decrease performance [59]. In addition, the optimizations appear to target very
specific combinations of hardware, which may leave users of the mod disappointed
when the mod does not work for their hardware combinations.
Save game mods take the longest to release after an official game release.
Table 7shows that the initial release of a save game mod takes a median of 638.5
days. Save game mods consist often of saved games which allow the player to load
a very advanced state of the game. For example, the Legit Skyrim Vanilla 99-Percent
Completed save game mod for the Skyrim game has completed and collected 99%
of the quests and items in the game. The game was played for a long time (more
than 110 hours) to reach this advanced state. We observed that the median number of
releases for save game mods was one. Save game mods with more than one release
offered saved games for various story lines. For example, each release of the 100
Percent Clean Save for Skyrim8mod offers a save game for a different story line in
the game.
The mods of games with official modding support are released faster than
those of games without such support. Figure 7shows the accumulated percentage
of mods that were released on a particular day after the initial game release for our
four studied game franchises. Hence, a steep line indicates that mods are released
relatively fast. Figure 7a shows that the mods for the Dragon Age 1 and Dragon Age 2
games are released faster than those of the Dragon Age: Inquisition game, which was
released after the Dragon Age 2 game. In particular, it took longer before the first mod
of the Dragon Age: Inquisition game was released: 32 days compared to 13 and 2 days
for the Dragon Age 1 and Dragon Age 2 games. In addition, Figure 7d shows that the
mods for the XCOM 2 game were released much faster than for the XCOM: Enemy
Unknown game. Both the Dragon Age: Inquisition and XCOM: Enemy Unknown
games do not have an officially-supported modding tool. Hence, Figures 7a and 7d
suggest that the mods of games with official modding support are released faster. A
possible explanation is that it is likely easier to create such mods.
Supporting the same modding tool across games is associated with faster
mod releases. Figure 7b shows that the mods of the Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout
4games were both released faster than those of the Fallout 3 game. For the mods of
8https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/56086
20 Daniel Lee et al.
Table 7: The median number of days between an official game update and a mod re-
lease for each mod category, along with the median number of days between adjacent
mod releases, sorted by the median number of days before an initial mod release.
Median number of days before a release
Mod Category Initial mod release Back-to-back mod release Game-triggered mod release
Save Games 638.5 14.0 216.0
Bug Fixes 614.0 4.0 182.5
Overhaul 588.5 6.0 90.0
Story 512.0 10.0 214.0
Character 476.5 3.5 127.0
World Object 442.0 6.0 81.3
Utility 428.0 8.0 95.5
Game Items 339.0 2.0 49.0
User Interface 334.0 4.0 41.0
Game Visuals 314.0 1.0 56.0
Appearance 309.0 2.0 67.5
Gameplay 274.5 5.0 50.0
Audio 194.5 6.0 37.0
Cheats 130.0 3.8 18.8
Performance 13.0 2.5 11.0
Fallout: New Vegas game, a possible explanation is that this game supports the same
modding tool as the Fallout 3 game. While the Fallout 4 game supports a different
modding tool, this tool was already supported by the Skyrim game. Figure 7b also
shows that Fallout 4 mods were released much faster than Skyrim mods. Figure 7b
suggests that when mod developers have the opportunity to get used to a modding
tool, it allows them to release mods faster, or even convert mods to the later game.
For example, the Asharas Hair Conversions mod for the Fallout: New Vegas game
was ported from a mod for the Fallout 3 game. The impact of supporting the same
modding tool across games is also demonstrated by the Fallout 76 game, which was
released after we collected the data for our study. Although the Fallout 76 game
would have official modding support at some point, modders did not wait for the
official support and started to release mods for the game using the modding tool of
the preceding Fallout 4 game [21].
A similar observation as for the Fallout game franchise can be made in Figure 7a
for the Dragon Age 1 and 2games, which support the same modding tool. In particu-
lar, the first 10% of the Dragon Age 2 were released within four days which suggests
that they could be converted with relatively low effort from existing Dragon Age 1
mods. Finally, an outlier in Figure 7is the Skyrim Special Edition game for which
42% of the mods were released in the first week after its release, as the Skyrim Spe-
cial Edition game is mostly a graphical update of the Skyrim game and hence shares
most of the code base, making the mods easy to convert [25].
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 21
0 20 40 60 80 100
Days after initial release
Accumulated percentage of mods per day
0 73 146 219 292 365 438 511 584 657 730
Dragon Age 1
Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age Inquisition
(a) The Dragon Age game franchise.
0 20 40 60 80 100
Days after initial release
Accumulated percentage of mods per day
0 73 146 219 292 365 438 511 584 657 730
Fallout 3
Fallout: New Vegas
Fallout 4
Skyrim
Skyrim Special Edition
(b) The Fallout and Skyrim game franchises
0 20 40 60 80 100
Days after initial release
Accumulated percentage of mods per day
0 73 146 219 292 365 438 511 584 657 730
The Witcher 2
The Witcher 3
(c) The Witcher game franchise
0 20 40 60 80 100
Days after initial release
Accumulated percentage of mods per day
0 73 146 219 292 365 438 511 584 657 730
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
XCOM 2
(d) The XCOM game franchise
Fig. 7: The accumulated percentage of the number of released mods per day after the
initial game release for the four studied game franchises.
A mod has a median of two releases, which are made closely after each
other. Performance mods are by far the fastest released type of mod, but they
often are not received well. The mods of games with official modding support
are released faster than mods of games without such support. In particular,
supporting the same modding tool across games within a franchise, or even
different franchises, is associated with faster mod releases.
7 RQ2: How Well is the Post-Release Support of Mods?
Motivation: In the previous section, we studied the release schedules of mods to learn
about the willingness and speed of mod developers to release new versions of a mod.
In this section, we study the willingness of mod developers to provide post-release
support for their mods. In particular, we study how, and how fast mod developers deal
with user-submitted bug reports.
22 Daniel Lee et al.
Table 8: The definitions of the bug statuses (sorted alphabetically).
Bug Status Definition
Being looked at The reported bug is currently under investigation.
Duplicate The report is a duplicate of another bug report.
Fixed The reported bug is fixed.
Known issue The reported bug was already known.
Needs more info The bug report does not have sufficient information to fix the bug.
New issue The bug report is new.
Not a bug The reported bug is not reproducible or not a bug.
Won’t fix The reported bug will not be fixed.
1 2 5 10 20 50 100 200 500
Number of bug reports per studied mod
Non−Media
Media
Fig. 8: The distribution of the number of bug reports per studied non-media and media
mod.
Approach: To study how mod developers deal with bug reports, we studied the
bug reports of the mods along several dimensions:
– The percentage of bug reports per bug status. Table 8shows the bug report
statuses that are supported by Nexus Mods. We calculated the percentage of bug
reports per status for each studied mod. We filtered out 4,741 mods that had less
than 10 bug reports as these mods with a low number of bug reports could bias
our results in this dimension.
– The quality of a bug report. We use the following features that were proposed
by Bettenburg et al. in their study on what makes a good bug report [7]: the num-
ber of itemizations, the number of code samples, the number of stack traces, and
the number of screenshots. In addition, we studied the length (in characters) of the
bug reports and their comments per studied mod. To investigate the quality of the
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 23
Being looked at
Known issue
Needs more info
Won't fix
Duplicate
Fixed
Not a bug
New issue
0 20 40 60 80 100
Percentage of bug reports per studied mod
Fig. 9: The distribution of the percentage of bug reports per studied mod for each bug
status. Sorted by the median percentage of bug reports per studied mod.
bug reports the first and third author independently manually analyzed a sample
of 96 non-media and 90 media bug reports (which statistically represents the pop-
ulation with a 95% confidence level and a 10% confidence interval). There were
conflicting observations for two reports. One of the conflicts was due a confusion
about what is a code sample, and one conflict was due to a confusion about what is
a stack trace. We decided to use a broad definition of code sample and stack trace.
Hence, we considered a snippet of a configuration file as a code sample, and log-
ging output as a stack trace. After broadening our definition of code samples and
stack traces, there were no further conflicts between the authors’ classifications.
– The people working on the bug report. We studied how many and which people
were involved in the bug report (i.e., the poster and the people commenting on the
report).
Findings: Non-media mods have a higher number of bug reports per studied
mod than media mods. Figure 8shows the distributions of the number of bug reports
per studied non-media and media mod. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test shows a statisti-
cally significant difference between the number of bug reports per mod for non-media
and media mods, with a medium Cliff’s delta effect size. Non-media mods have a me-
dian number of six bug reports per studied mod and media mods have a median num-
ber of two bug reports per studied mod. An intuitive explanation is that non-media
mods are more complex than media mods, and are therefore more error-prone. We
are unable to find a statistically significant difference under the significance thresh-
old of α= 0.05 between the number of bug reports for mods with and without official
modding support, and mods for Bethesda and non-Bethesda games.
Complete overhaul mods have the highest median number of bug reports
per mod. Figure 10 shows the number of bug reports per studied mod for all mods
across each high level mod category. The median number of bug reports per mod
for overhauls is 14. However, the number of bug reports per mod across overhauls
24 Daniel Lee et al.
Save
Audio
Cheats
Appearance
Game Visuals
Bug Fixes
Performance
Character
Utility
Gameplay
World Object
Game Items
User Interface
Story
Overhaul
110 100
Number of bug reports per studied mod
Fig. 10: The distribution of the number of bug reports per studied mod for each high
level mod category.
varies greatly. We manually sampled 39 overhaul mods and found that 26 of the 39
overhauls mods (67%) with bug reports added new content to a game. The median
number of bug reports for these 26 mods was 16.
A median of 67% of the bug reports of a mod have the ‘New issue’ status.
Figure 9shows the percentage of bug reports per studied mod for each bug status. For
most studied mods, the majority of the bug reports are labeled with the ‘New issue’
status. Prior work [3] on bug tracking systems of the Eclipse and Firefox open source
projects reported that 18-33% of the bug reports have a status that is equivalent to
the ‘New issue’ status on Nexus Mods. The percentage that we found is considerably
higher. There are several possible explanations for this difference. First, there is a
large difference in scale between the studied open source projects in prior work and
our studied mods. In particular, many of these mods were created by a single devel-
oper who may lack the time or simply the interest to fix all reported bugs. Second,
we observed during our manual study that the vast majority of the bug reports were
of low quality, making them difficult to interpret and address. A possible explana-
tion is that gamers find it difficult to report stack traces or code samples, since it is
commonly not trivial to retrieve them (e.g., in games where it is difficult to cut and
paste a stack trace). Third, we learned during our manual analysis that many users
have several mods for a game installed. When a new version of the game is released,
often one or more of these mods break. Unfortunately, it is hard for users to identify
which of the mods are broken and therefore, they report all their installed mods as
broken. For example, the developer of the popular 90000 weight limit mod for the
The Witcher 3 game explains that while most game releases break the mod, the mod
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 25
is always updated.9The developer explains that many of the reported bugs are not
related to the mod and he gives several suggestions on how to rule out problems with
other mods before submitting a bug report.
The vast majority of bug reports for mods are of low quality. Bettenburg et
al. [7] showed that bug reports that contain stack traces get fixed sooner while bug
reports that contain code samples have a higher likelihood of getting fixed. During our
manual analysis we found that 3% of the bug reports for non-media mods contained a
stack trace, 2% contained a code sample and 6% contained a screenshot or video. In
addition, 3% of the bug reports for media mods contained a stack trace, 4% contained
a code sample and 4% contained a screenshot. Hence, according to Bettenburg et al.’s
study it is not surprising that many of the bug reports on Nexus Mods are not yet fixed.
Interestingly, bug reports for media mods contained a code sample more often than
bug reports for non-media mods. While the higher percentage of code samples for
media mods is surprising, a manual inspection of the bug reports shows that most of
these code samples are not actual source code, but a snippet of a configuration file.
Such confirmation files are essential to activate mods.
If a bug report gets a response, the median number of days to get that re-
sponse is 0. Likewise, if a bug report gets fixed, this takes a median of 1 day.
While many bug reports do not get a response at all, the ones that got a response
often received it on the same day as the bug was reported. In addition, while many
bug reports remain unsolved, the ones that are solved are often solved within one day.
Hence, it seems that mod developers are willing to solve and respond to bug reports
quickly. A possible explanation is that mod developers would quickly address trivial
issues, and avoid working on the more difficult ones. However, as explained above,
the low quality of bug reports often prevents mod developers from addressing issues
at all.
In 51% of the bug reports, the first comment is by someone other than the
mod developer. Figure 11 shows that the median number of commenters per bug
report is one, which would suggest that the discussion is done between the bug re-
porter and the mod developer. However, we found that in 51% of the bug reports
with one comment, the discussion was actually between the bug reporter and another
community member. This relatively high percentage indicates the engagement of the
community of a mod. We did observe a difference between the percentage of fixed
bug reports: of the 1,642 fixed bug reports with one comment, 66% of the reports
that received a comment from the mod developer were fixed compared to 34% of the
reports that received a comment from someone other than the developer. In the lat-
ter case, we observed several indications that the engaged community member was a
contributor of the mod in question, or that the bug report was fixed without a message
from the mod developer.
The bug report comments of non-media mods have a greater median length
in characters than those of media mods. Figure 12 shows the median length in
characters of bug report comments of non-media (400 characters) and media mods
(360 characters). The Wilcoxon rank-sum test shows a significant difference between
9https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/836?tab=posts
26 Daniel Lee et al.
0 10 20 30 40 50
Number of commenters per bug report
Fig. 11: The distribution of the number of unique commenters per bug report.
100 200 500 1000 2000 5000 10000
Median length of bug comments per studied mod
Non−Media
Media
Fig. 12: The distribution of the median length of the bug report comments per studied
mod for non-media and media mods.
the median lengths, with a small Cliff’s delta effect size. This difference suggests that
bug reports for non-media mods are slightly more complex than those of media mods.
In general, bug reports for mods are of low quality. As a result, many of
them remain unsolved. In addition, in many bug reports, community members
other than the mod developers are engaging with the bug reporter.
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 27
8 Implications of our Findings
In this section, we outline the most important implications of our findings for game
developers and developers of mod distribution platforms.
8.1 Implications for Game Developers
Game developers who desire a modding community for their game should con-
sider supporting an official modding tool. One of the goals of our paper is to inves-
tigate whether providing official modding support for a game contributes to a healthy
modding community. In our preliminary study we observed that 9 of the 10 most
mod-popular games on the Nexus Mods platform have an official modding tool. In
addition, we showed in RQ1 that the mods for games with official modding support
are released faster than the mods for games without such support. In particular, this
release speed improves for games that use the same modding tool as other games,
which often allows mod developers to easily convert mods for newer games. An ex-
ample of a game developer who does well at supporting the modding community is
Bethesda. In fact, when Bethesda released the Skyrim Special Edition game, it was
compared by journalists not only to the original Skyrim game, but also to the mod-
ded version of that game [25]. As Bethesda uses the modding community of their
games as a breeding ground for hiring new developers [17], they show that it can be
beneficial for game developers to maintain a healthy modding community.
Game developers should not only provide support for creating a mod, but
also for maintaining it. Most of the studied mods are not well maintained after their
initial release. In RQ1, we observed that the median time between back-to-back mod
releases is only 3.5 days. In addition, in RQ2 we observed that mod developers re-
spond to and solve some bug reports very fast. Hence, there are several indications
that mod developers and the modding community are willing to provide continuous
maintenance for mods. Hence, game developers who wish to support the modding
community of their games should also consider providing better support for main-
taining the mod. Therefore, game developers should continuously improve modding
tools after a game release in order to help drive the popularity of the original game.
For example, DOTA, Counter-Strike, and DOTA Auto Chess are mods within games
who have helped drive the popularity of the original games.
8.2 Implications for Developers of Mod Distribution Platforms
Mod distribution platforms should consider providing tools for detecting con-
flicts between mods. During our study, we often came across cases in which the mod
developer provides an informal disclaimer about the compatibility of a mod with
other mods of the game. In most of these cases, the mod developer does not guar-
antee compatibility. The main reason is that mods for the same game often modify
the same files. Hence, there may be conflicts between these modifications, especially
because many users install several mods for a game. Because of the large number
28 Daniel Lee et al.
of mods for some games, it is not feasible to test a mod in all possible installation
configurations. We envision mod distribution platforms acting in a supporting role
when it comes to detecting conflicts between mods. For example, these platforms
could inspect the files of a mod that is being submitted and report potential conflicts
with other mods. The mod developer can then focus on testing these combinations of
mods.
The Nexus Mod distribution platform should improve its bug reporting sys-
tem, e.g., by guiding users better when submitting a bug report. We observed in
our study that the vast majority of the bug reports for mods are of low quality. An im-
portant first step to improving the quality of the bug reports would be to better guide
users when they are reporting a bug. For example, we observed that a very small
portion of the bug reports contains a stack trace, code sample or screenshot. Explic-
itly asking the bug reporter to add such clarifications for a bug report may increase
its quality. In addition, future studies should investigate what a good bug report for
mods looks like. For example, we observed that mod developers ask users to post the
loading order of their mods when submitting a bug report to investigate possible con-
flicts between mods.10 To identify the percentage of bug reports that contain a loading
order, we searched all bug reports for several variations of the “load order” keywords
and found that only 4% of the bug reports mentions these keywords. After manually
studying a representative sample of 89 of those bug reports (95% confidence level
and 10% confidence interval), we found that only 25 out of those 89 (28%) bug re-
ports actually contain a loading order. Hence, the total number of bug reports that
contain an actual load order is very small (approximately 1%). We envision that mod
distribution platforms explicitly ask bug reporters to include their mod loading order.
In addition, we came across many complaints about bugs of mods in other sec-
tions than the bug reports. For example, in the ‘posts’ section of the 90000 weight
limit mod, there are many mentions of bugs, while the mod only has two bug reports.
Hence, the current bug reporting tool is either unknown by or unclear to mod users.
8.3 Implications for Mod Developers
Mod developers should make it easier for gamers to collect in-game stack traces
or code samples. In our study, we observed that bug reports tend to be of low quality.
A possible explanation is that gamers find it difficult to report stack traces or code
samples, since it is commonly not trivial to retrieve them, e.g., in games where it is
difficult to simply cut and paste a stack trace. Hence, we suggest that mod developers
provide gamers with an automated and simple mechanism for collecting in-game
stack traces or error symptoms.
10 https://www.nexusmods.com/Core/Libs/Common/Widgets/ModBugReplyList?issue_
id=18914
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 29
9 Research Challenges
In this section, we highlight the most important research challenges that we encoun-
tered during our study. These challenges all require dedicated studies to be addressed.
9.1 Establishing a Ground Truth for the Impact of a Modding Community
A major challenge in research on game mods is that it is hard to establish a ground
truth for the impact of a modding community on the original game. For example, it is
difficult to estimate how the popularity of a mod-popular game would have evolved
without its modding community. In our work, we made a first step towards estimat-
ing the impact of official modding tools on game mods by studying games within the
same game franchise. While definitely not perfect, studying games within the same
game franchise mitigates some of the confounding factors that exist when studying
completely different games. Further studies are necessary to determine how a ground
truth for the impact of a modding community can be determined. For example, fu-
ture studies should conduct a large scale and longitudinal investigation of players of
games with and without mods.
9.2 Studying the Impact of Game Mods on the Life Expectancy of the Original
Game
Another potential benefit of game mods for game developers is that game mods could
increase the life expectancy of the original games. In our data, we have observed sev-
eral “older” games (such as Skyrim) which are still very popular, possibly because of
the modding community. Future studies should investigate how the impact of mods
on the life expectancy of a game can be measured reliably. First, one should decide
how to measure life expectancy. For example, do we consider the number of total
playing hours on Steam as a proxy for a game’s life expectancy? The challenge of
this metric is that it would be hard to associate with the existence of a modding com-
munity, as there is no way to verify whether a Steam gamer has modded the game,
and whether the mods actually impact a game’s life expectancy. In addition, there
could be many confounding factors that impact the life expectancy of a game. For ex-
ample, the life expectancy could be impacted by the type of the game, news coverage
about the game, the addition of official new levels/items, an inherently more loyal
playerbase, etc. These confounding factors cannot be ignored yet they are currently
impossible to quantify in a reliable manner. A possible direction for future work is to
collaborate with developers of games with an active modding community and mon-
itor how many of the currently active users run their games with mods. In addition,
such collaboration could also yield further insights on which mods are being used.
30 Daniel Lee et al.
9.3 Studying the Impact of Game Mods on the Ratings of the Original Game
A research challenge that we uncovered in our study is the complexity of analyzing
the relations between a modding community and ratings of its original game. Under-
standing how game mods (or the existence of a modding community) affect the rating
of the original game would help understand the benefits of game mods for game de-
velopers. Unfortunately, there are many confounding factors that impact the ratings
of a game. For example, the ratings can be impacted by good/bad updates [23] or a
change to the price of the game. Hence, there currently is no reliable mechanism to
correlate the presence of a modding community with the original game’s rating. In
addition, the benefits of a modding community for game developers may be reflected
in other metrics than the rating. For example, a game could have more daily players
because of its mods. However, the impact of a modding community on such metrics
is again difficult to reliably quantify, as there are many confounding factors. Future
studies should investigate reliable methods of quantifying the impact of the presence
of a modding community on the ratings of a game to provide deeper insights on the
benefits of game mods for game developers.
9.4 Studying the Impact of Game Mods on the Time Required to Develop Features
Another potential benefit of game mods is that they can be integrated into the original
game, thereby potentially saving the implementation time. Unfortunately, this benefit
is impossible to study at a large scale, since these games are not open source, making
it impossible to access their source code or issue tracking systems. However, even
with such access, the time to develop a new feature would be hard to quantify. The
vast majority of new features in a game is not based on mods, and likewise the vast
majority of game mods will never end up in the original game. Future studies that
have access to development team or source code history data should use qualitative
methods such as interviews to observe if and how mods impact the development time
of a feature.
10 Threats to Validity
This section outlines the threats to the validity of our findings.
10.1 Internal Validity
A threat to the internal validity of our study is the way in which our studied di-
mensions were defined. For example, we do not know which portion of the mods
for a game with official modding support were actually built using the officially-
supported tool. However, we use this dimension to indicate the mindset of a game
developer rather than draw conclusions about the quality of the modding tool or the
mods that are created with it. Future studies should further investigate whether the
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 31
quality of mods that are created using an officially-supported tool is higher. In addi-
tion, we chose a threshold to distinguish media and non-media mods. This threshold
was selected based on the distribution of the portion of media files in a mod, and the
threshold takes into account the number of files in a mod. To mitigate this threat, we
repeated our analysis after lowering the thresholds to 90% and 85%, and we found
that our findings still hold.
Another threat to the internal validity of our study is that game developers are
not required to publish official game release notes [35]. Hence, we may have missed
game releases which in turn affects our calculation of the release time of a mod. In
addition, as the data on the Nexus Mods platform is barely moderated, it is quite
noisy and we have no guarantee that the publication date of a mod is its release date.
Finally, not all releases of a mod may end up on Nexus Mods. For example, game
developers may release a closed beta-version of their game. Hence the numbers that
we report in our study are all low bound estimates.
Another threat is that we use the release schedule of mods as a proxy for the
willingness of mod developers to release new versions of a mod. It is possible that
a mod requires only one release. For example, simpler mods, such as texture mods,
could be perfect after their initial release (even though we observed in Section 6that
media mods have a median of two releases as well). To verify the impact of this threat,
we attempted to identify whether single-release mods were indeed perfect. First, we
observed that 74% of the bug reports that were posted after the single release have the
‘New issue’ status. This 74% is higher than the overall percentage of mods with the
‘New issue’ status (67%). Hence, this higher percentage is an indication that often
mod developers of single-release mods abandoned the mod while it still required
maintenance, rather than that the mod was perfect. In addition, we manually studied
a sample of 50 bug reports that were posted after the release of a single-release mod,
and we observed that 13 of those bug reports were confirmed by others. Hence, the
reported bugs affects multiple modders, making it more likely that the mod requires
a bug fix (and is not perfect).
Finally, it is important to keep in mind that the actions of the original game devel-
opers may bias our findings. For example, the original game developers could decide
to integrate a mod in the original game, or they could ensure the proper functioning
of the mod across releases of the original game. As a result, the mod may appear
unsupported on Nexus Mods. Future studies should further investigate how game de-
velopers react to mods.
10.2 External Validity
A threat to the external validity of our study is that we only studied mods from the 20
most mod-popular games on the Nexus Mods distribution platform. As a result, we
did not study mods for games that may be mod-popular, but do not have a strong pres-
ence on the Nexus Mods platform. An example of such a game is the Minecraft game,
which is popular amongst modders but of which the mods are distributed through
other platforms, such as the Planet Minecraft platform.11 Future studies should in-
11 https://www.planetminecraft.com/resources/mods/
32 Daniel Lee et al.
vestigate how our findings apply to games and mods that are available through other
mod distribution platforms.
Another threat concerning the generalizability of our study is that we only studied
mods with at least 1,000 endorsements. We conducted a sensitivity analysis to see if
our findings are biased by the 1,000 endorsement threshold. We repeated our analysis
using 750 and 1,250 as endorsement thresholds and observed that our findings still
hold. Future studies should investigate whether our findings apply to less popular
mods as well.
11 Conclusion
Game mods are community-driven contributions to a game that are made by players
of the game who wish to improve existing or add new functionality to the game. For
example, a mod can improve the textures of a game, add new weapons to the game, or
even provide a complete overhaul of the game. In this paper, we studied 9,521 popular
mods from the 20 most-modded games on the Nexus Mods distribution platform. In
particular, we studied the characteristics, release schedules and bug reports of the
mods, to get a better understanding of the willingness of the modding community of
a game to contribute and maintain mods. We studied mods along three dimensions:
(1) mods for games with and without official modding support, (2) media and non-
media mods, and (3) mods of Bethesda and non-Bethesda games. Below, we list our
most important findings:
1. Mods for games with official modding support have a higher median endorsement
ratio than mods for games with no official modding support. In addition, mods for
games with official modding support are released faster.
2. Supporting the same modding tool across games within a game franchise, or even
different franchises, is associated with faster mod releases.
3. A mod has a median of two releases, which are often released within four days of
each other. In addition, mod developers respond to and solve bug reports quickly.
4. Unfortunately, bug reports for mods are of low quality, which make them hard to
address. In addition, many bugs are reported outside the bug reporting tool.
In this paper, we found several indications that the modding communities of
games are willing to contribute to mods. Many of these mods are being used by
hundreds of thousands of gamers. Hence, while we are definitely not suggesting that
game developers should rely on mod developers for the core functionality of their
games, mods are a good and cost-effective way of keeping the players of a game
engaged. As a result, it can be beneficial for game developers to provide official sup-
port for modding their games. We suggest that game developers and developers of
third-party mod distribution platforms step in to help mod developers improve the
post-release support of their mods. Game developers could offer incentives to mod
developers who provide excellent post-release support for their mods. For example,
popular mods that are well-maintained could be included in an official release of the
game. In addition, developers of mod distribution platforms could improve the infras-
tructure for reporting and addressing bugs, thereby striving to improve the quality of
the bug reports.
Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications 33
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