For as long as PC games have been around, people have been modding them. And while players love being able to modify their games, adding new features or fixes, recent comments reveal that Capcom isn’t totally on board with such digital shenanigans, with the publisher suggesting that all PC game mods are effectively cheats.
Modding Resident Evil games has become a pretty popular trend, with the release of each new game in the horror series bringing a wave of fun new alterations from players. Folks sometimes add out-of-place characters—like Thomas the Tank Engine or CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas—into the spooky games, often with hilarious (or disturbing) results. We’ve also seen players remove Leon’s shirt from the Resident Evil 4 remake using mods. Yet, Capcom has some issues with all this modding, suggesting mods can hurt a game’s reputation and increase development costs. The company also says that, from a technical standpoint, all mods are cheats.
As spotted by GamesRadar, during an October 25 Capcom R&D presentation about its game engine, cheating, and piracy, the company claims that mods are “no different” than cheats, and that they can hurt game development.
“For the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats,” Capcom explained. The only exception to this are mods which are “officially” supported by the developer and, as Capcom sees it, all user-created mods are “internally” no different than cheating.
Capcom goes on to say that some mods with offensive content can be “detrimental” to a game or franchise’s reputation. The publisher also explained that mods can create new bugs and lead to more players needing support, stretching resources, and leading to increased game development costs or even delays. (I can’t help but feel my eyes starting to roll…)
Kotaku has contacted Capcom about its stance on PC mods.
Still, Capcom does have a bit of a point that, on a technical level, mods and cheats are pretty similar, and trying to create multiplayer games that block cheating but allow modding seems like a tricky, ever-moving tightrope to walk. And Capcom isn’t outright saying that mods are bad or that the company is against them. In the presentation, Capcom admits that “the majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game.”
However, it’s still a little worrying that it seems to group mods and cheats into one technical bucket, especially considering how many single-player games Capcom publishes. Can you cheat in a single-player game? I mean, yes, you can give yourself infinite ammo or health, but it doesn’t hurt anybody else. So hopefully those kinds of cheats and mods in games like Resident Evil won’t become something Capcom tries to block in the future.
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