It is becoming increasingly difficult for game developers to manage the cost of developing a game, while meeting the high expectations of gamers. One way to balance the increasing gamer expectation and development stress is to build an active modding community around the game. There exist several examples of games with an extremely active and successful modding community, with the Minecraft game being one of the most notable ones. This paper reports on an empirical study of 1,114 popular and 1,114 unpopular Minecraft mods from the CurseForge mod distribution platform, one of the largest distribution platforms for Minecraft mods. We analyzed the relationship between 33 features across 5 dimensions of mod characteristics and the popularity of mods (i.e., mod category, mod documentation, environmental context of the mod, remuneration for the mod, and community contribution for the mod), to understand the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods. We firstly verify that the studied dimensions have significant explanatory power in distinguishing the popularity of the studied mods. Then we evaluated the contribution of each of the 33 features across the 5 dimensions. We observed that popular mods tend to have a high quality description and promote community contribution.

中文翻译：

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流行的 Minecraft mods 特征的实证研究

游戏开发商越来越难以管理游戏开发成本，同时满足游戏玩家的高期望。平衡不断增加的玩家期望和开发压力的一种方法是围绕游戏建立一个活跃的模组社区。有几个游戏具有非常活跃和成功的改装社区，其中 Minecraft 游戏是最著名的游戏之一。本文报告了对来自 CurseForge mod 分发平台的 1,114 个流行和 1,114 个不受欢迎的 Minecraft mod 的实证研究，CurseForge mod 分发平台是 Minecraft mod 的最大分发平台之一。我们分析了模组特征的 5 个维度上的 33 个特征与模组流行度（即模组类别、模组文档、模组的环境背景、模组报酬、以及社区对模组的贡献），以了解流行的 Minecraft 模组的特点。我们首先验证所研究的维度在区分所研究模型的流行度方面具有显着的解释力。然后我们评估了 33 个特征中每一个在 5 个维度上的贡献。我们观察到流行的模组往往具有高质量的描述并促进社区贡献。