I’ve been daydreaming about creating libre mods for proprietary video games that I’ve played as a kid and I would like to hear opinions on whether or not that is something worth pursuing. On one hand, a libre mod might distract from future libre game alternatives. On the other hand, it provides resources to potential libre alternatives and makes people more aware of libre culture. I would love to hear what people here have to say about this.
For sure, a large part of the audience for open-source games isn’t the general gamer public, at least for a very long time. First you have to cater to early adopters/testers and potential contributors, that is if your project isn’t just scratching a personal itch and isn’t really planned to grow into a multi-person effort.
But contrary to some years ago where modding was very much about so called stand-alone mods (which would work just as well on open-source engines, and some of these projects switched once their base game was abandoned by the original company developing it), these days modding seems to (again?) much more about adding some functions to an existing well liked game. See Skyrim mods as an example.
Why such a modder for Skyrim would be interested in anything other than modding Skyrim (or what ever game they currently prefer), is not clear to me. So, no I don’t think most current modders are a good target audience for open-source game engine developers etc.
I was thinking more about the large scale mods for games like Super Mario 64 but your point still stands. Even in my ideal scenario, it’s unlikely that modders would transfer over unless the company that made the game clamped down on all modding activity; at that point, I wouldn’t even be able to make libre mods.