Games that would have died without community support/mods

Potential-Monke

So I'm still waiting on Beat Games to let me know that Beat Saber will be a free upgrade, including all the packs I've already purchased. Now, it's owned by Facebook so I'm also expecting them to just straight up charge again, in which case I'm out, but one can hope. But it also got me to thinking, Beat Saber is a game which would have died within a couple of years if it wasn't for the PC modding community. They literally kept that game alive, and catapulted it into the limelight with the ability to play user created maps with unofficial music. Some say they did a far better job than Beat Games.

But they simply didn't release enough official content, which was painfully obvious if you had it on PSVR. And when they did release packs, they started releasing very specific artists which can exclude many fans. I have zero interest in playing Beat Saber to BTS, Billie Eilish, Greenday, fecking Lizzo. The other packs usually had a mix so you might enjoy a few from the total, but these artist specific ones were terrible. It also started to stray away from the music which it launched with, and Jaroslav leaving was an indication of how things were going imo, because his tracks felt made with the game in mind, unlike the popular artist packs.

So it was 100% the modding community and streamers who kept this gave relevant. And it made me ponder, what other games were kept alive simply by the fans/mods/streamers? One could argue the yearly CoD is kept alive by such, minus the modders. Being a console player, I'm probably unaware of exactly how many games communities have kept alive, as the whole modding scene baffles me, insofar as why anyone would spend so much time to do things like these, especially these years long still in development mods for massive games.

So, oh learned peeps of boards gaming, what other games would have died if not for the community?

Retr0gamer

For Honor and Rainbow Six Siege would have died early if not for great support from Ubisoft that made those games great and built communities. Also Amongst Us was a clone of werewolf that barely anyone knew about except streams jumped on it. Same with Flappy Bird and Pewdiepie playing it.

SuperBowserWorld

Skyrim thrives on modding and community support.

PsychoPete

Farming Simulator would have died a death if it wasn't for community mods

Potential-Monke

Oh, didn't know about Farming Sim. That's an interesting one. What about Eurotruck Sim?

Mr.Saturn

Not sure 'saved' would be fair to put out there as Ed McMillen has a following anyway, but the collaborative community buzz around The Binding of Isacc really elevated the game from being 'what Ed McMillen did next' to 'the looming cloud that Ed McMillen can't escape.' From the early days of everyone sharing the best exploits to survive the journey to The Womb and beyond on Youtube/Reddit, et al to the absolute madness that was everyone working out hints to unlock The Keeper, it really is the rare example of a single-player game turned into a much bigger and much more different beast than it would've otherwise been thanks to its audience.

That's even before we get into mods, supports and patches from the community that sort of took on a life of their own. Hell, the most recent expansion to Isaac, Repentance, is actually just a fan-mod (Antibirth) given a couple tweaks and official approval.

Retr0gamer

I think Giant Bomb talking and enjoying Borderlands so much raised the profile of that game and helped Borderlands 2 become a massive success that far eclipsed the original.

Nier as well is a game that got absolutely hammered in reviews by reviewers either not giving it a chance (giving up because they couldn't follow the map) or... well... reviewing it fairly, it really is a 7/10 game. However the guys from Warning a Huge Podcast and their friends really jumped on Nier to promote it as a game well worth playing and it grew a cult following from there.

Etrian Odyssey was almost completely ignored by reviewers but Jeremy Parish would talk constantly about how great it was. He was right, it's one of the best RPGs of all time. It gained a cult following and became a long running series for Atlus that has only stopped because of the lack of touch screen consoles.

The Shin Megami Tensei series probably wouldn't be as popular as it is now if it wasn't for Kurt Kalata and the Hardcore gaming 101 community being so into it and promoting SMT3: Nocturne as one of the best RPGs of all time. Persona 3 was covered by a lot of publications as a result.

Trails in the Sky and Ys as well got a cult following around the HG101 community as well, however that community also had a localisers from XSeed who pushed to get those games localised when other companies would have classified them as a loss maker. They pretty much wouldn't have been released otherwise.

There's also Earthbound, one of the greatest games of all time that was totally mis-marketed in the West by Nintendo and reviewers didn't get. It got a small cult following that congregated at starman.net which helped raise the profile of the game. This led to the formation of the company Fangamer, who started off selling unofficial earthbound merchandise and the Mother 3 fan translation.

pixelburp

Half Life?

I'm not doing a hot take for the sake of it, but how much of the game's longevity came from it being the way you played Team Fortress or Counterstrike? Both games became franchises in their own right but they started from the base game's open embrace of modding.

Potential-Monke

That's an interesting one. Did the popularity of TF/CS increase the main games though? I loved the Half Life games, but I never had the chance to get into TF/CS so I don't really have any connection between them. But that also means I wasn't anywhere in the loop so I'm not sure.

Retr0gamer

Nah half life was an absolute phenomenon that pretty much changed pc gaming and fps games forever. Everyone with a gaming PC had to have it. The fact that so many people had the game coupled with the ease of modification was what made those mods popular which then fed back into more half life sales.

breezy1985

Bought Sim City 4 for 5e on Steam at Christmas after last playing about 20 years ago. Could not believe it's still the most popular version and that is surely a fair bit due to Simtropolis.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120121872#Comment_120121872

I think it was a bit of a symbiotic relationship: HL was a transformative single player game but its actual multiplayer was a bit wet fart. The mod tools that came out though were something else and opened the door to Counterstrike et al, and those were the things IMO that gave HL some legs. They kept the core game in the consciousness as a kind of gateway drug to a bunch of other games - that were also free!

That's not to say without mods Half Life would have been forgotten, but it definitely gave it more prominence, more exposure by enabling players to get into other types of games. It made a good game better.

Retr0gamer

That's mostly true. Half Life multiplayer was excellent and had a pretty active community until counterstrike took over everything.

dreamers75

Half Life 100% is where it is in the modern lexicon because of mods.

Another kinda obscure in this forum is Arma, launched so many mods that became games or inspired games.

Unreal is another in that Unreal isnt even a game anymore but an engine.