An empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods
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An empirical study of the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods Daniel Lee1 · Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur1 Cor-Paul Bezemer2 · Ahmed E. Hassan1
· Dayi Lin1 · Mohammed Sayagh1 ·
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Mods · Mod development · CurseForge · Minecraft
1 Introduction The team size, cost and complexity in game development can grow exponentially as the user requirements increase (Shumovsky 2018). Thus, it has become challenging to develop a successful game, and game developers are constantly under an immense amount of stress (Phillips 2018). One approach to balance the increasing gamer expectation and development stress is to build an active modding community around the game. Skyrim and
Communicated by: Emerson Murphy-Hill Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur
[email protected]
Extended author information available on the last page of the article.
Empirical Software Engineering
Minecraft are examples of games that have been successful in building active modding communities (Hackman and Bj¨orkqvist 2014; Zorn et al. 2013) to increase the longevity of the games. For example, the Skyrim game still has a median of 86 new mods released per day 8 years after its initial game release in 2011, along with more than 514M total unique downloads of mods (Scott 2007). Prior work also shows that an active modding community can contribute to the increased sales of the original game (Poretski and Arazy 2017). There are two key components of an active modding community of a game: the active development of mods, and the active adoption of mods by gamers. In our prior work, we looked at how game developers can help maintain the active development of mods, and observed that games from developers with a consistent
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