This was a .plan update by Epic Megagames' Brandon "Greenmarine" Rienhart (one of the biggest payed game developers in the industry, and sort of a personal hero of mine)
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Check out
www.gamespy.com/stats. Notice that Half-Life has about ten thousand players online at any one time (during peak afternoon/evening). That's more than Quake 3 and UT combined. If you click on Half-Life,
it'll break the players down by mod. Counterstrike is always on top with approximately 60 to 70% of all Half-Life players (online) playing.
Minh Le, the author of Counterstrike, has effectively more people playing his game online at any one point in time than either Quake3 or UT. Consider this very closely if you work in the 3D industry. This is important.
I recently spoke on the Unreal Technology Page of a "renaissance" in garage game development. This is no more better demonstrated than by what Minh Le has achieved. His mod, a free product he's designed because he loves games, loves Half-Life, and loves the community, is selling tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of copies of Half-Life. (I know people who have purchased the game just to play Counterstrike!)
Valve is a smart and fast company. They've got quite a few kick bellybutton mod authors under exclusive contract. (I won't argue this point, its definitely in Valve's favor, but I think that highly successful mod authors like Minh Le could demand a very high price.) If you look at the December 1999 PC Data, you'll see that Half-Life is still selling strong (as is Op For, the recent awesome addon by Gearbox). The sales numbers for that month are nearly the same. Now, we know that a bunch of people already own Half-Life, so I would expect Half-Life core sales to be somewhat lower than the addon. Clearly Half-Life is still drawing in players.
I would argue that a large part of this continued success in sales is due to Valve brilliant and unrelenting support of the mod community. This is NOTHING NEW to Valve, but quite new to the rest of the industry. Valve bought up Team Fortress and gave them their dream: Team Fortress with full support, a new look, and Team Fortress 2 a completely new game. Valve is supporting Counterstrike too.
id Software did Extremities, but I would argue that the compensation they gave the mod authors was quite a bit less than they deserved. Obviously, as professional game developers, we know there is a big difference between "deserved" and "financially feasible." A company goes with what it can
get.
Here's what I want to say to the companies: Mod authors sell copies of your game. Supporting the mod community, making your game fully extensible, releasing programming tool kits, sells copies of your game. It has the _potential_ to sell a LOT of copies of your game. If you find a kid on the net who kicks bellybutton with game content, watch him. Talk to him. Hire him, if you think he's worthwhile.
Epic is built on developers and designers who had the initiative to approach the company. I believe strongly that this has contributed to Epic.
" Just seemed like a good read, and maybe something to consider.
