Prior work has shown that gamer loyalty is important for the sales of a developer’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 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.

中文翻译：

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打造完美游戏——游戏修改的实证研究

先前的工作表明，玩家忠诚度对于开发商未来游戏的销售很重要。因此，对于游戏开发者来说，增加他们游戏的寿命很重要。然而，由于开发人员的日程安排往往已经超负荷，游戏开发人员无法始终满足游戏社区不断增长和不断变化的需求。所谓的模组制作者可以潜在地帮助游戏开发者解决游戏玩家的需求。修改器是为游戏提供修改或全新内容的爱好者。通过支持模组制作者，游戏开发者可以满足其游戏玩家群快速增长和不断变化的需求。模组制作者有可能在延长游戏的预期寿命方面发挥作用，从而节省游戏开发者的时间和金钱，并为他们的游戏玩家群带来更好的整体游戏体验。在本文中，我们根据经验研究了从 Nexus Mods 分发平台中提取的 9,521 个 mod 的元数据。在我们研究时，Nexus Mods 分发平台是最大的 PC 游戏 mod 分发平台之一。我们论文的目标是从定量的角度提供有关 Nexus Mods 分发平台上模组的有用见解，并为研究人员进一步探索游戏模组提供坚实的基础。为了更好地了解模组在延长游戏寿命方面的潜力，我们研究了它们的特性，并研究了它们的发布时间表和发布后支持（在错误报告方面），以此作为模组社区为游戏做出贡献的意愿的代表一个游戏。我们发现为模组提供官方支持对游戏模组的感知质量是有益的：由原始游戏开发商提供模组工具的游戏比没有此类工具的游戏模组具有更高的中位数认可率。此外，模组用户愿意提交模组的错误报告。然而，他们经常无法使用 Nexus Mods 平台的错误报告工具系统地做到这一点，导致错误报告质量低，难以解决。我们的研究结果初步了解了游戏模组的特征、发布时间表和发布后支持。我们的调查结果表明，一些游戏有一个非常活跃的模组社区，它通过模组为这些游戏做出贡献。根据我们的调查结果，我们建议希望为自己的游戏建立活跃的模组社区的游戏开发者向模组社区提供官方支持的模组工具。此外，