Most studio's explicitly ban modding, turn a blind eye to it, but still keep the bans in their TOS/EULA
22h 29m ago by piefed.social/u/DevDave in askgaming@piefed.social
I really like these studios and their games, Keen and CD Projekt, but both have blanket bans in their licensing. I mention them only because I am familiar with them and they are not unique.
From CDPR
[No technical misuse] Don’t modify, merge, distribute, translate, reverse engineer, or attempt to obtain or use source code of, decompile, or disassemble our Games and/or Services, unless we expressly allow that in this Agreement or it is allowed by the applicable law.
[No hacking or cheating] Don’t create, use, make available and/or distribute cheats. By cheats we mean things like exploits, automation software, robots, bots, hacks, spiders, spyware, scripts, trainers, extraction tools, or other software that interact with or affect our Games and/or Services in any way (including any unauthorised third party programs that collect information about our Games and/or Services by reading areas of memory used by our Games and/or Services to store information).
As a modder, I have to partially decompile the executable to see what is going on and how to make adjustments. Often its a tree among the forest, laser focus thing where I am stepping along in an attached debugger. Alternatively Cyberpunk 2077 has mods designed to support other mods (eg CyberEngine) which is hooked into at least a third of the game logic.
While I am not afraid of being financially ruined by the current operators of these studios, things change and sometimes not for the best.
There has to be a better alternative where Game studios don't hold the legal sword of diamocles over a modder.
Somehow, I dont think this refers directly to making mods that enhance the gaming experience. The technical portion seems to be an attempt to say "dont decompile our entire game and reverse engineer it" as its main focus as I interpret it. But the language isn't clear and it seems this could be used against modders, especially ones charging money.
Unfortunately the ambiguity makes this both worse but also less likely to be enforceable beyond mediation.
They should have to write clear language on this shit. Can't make a vague mess as a catch all whatever we feel.
I think the worst part is the only reason really to do this longterm is to make a game company a more attractive buyout/smash and grab for shitty massive corporations to extract some short term profits from.
Easier to sell when the seller can promise the buyer they can nuke all of it with a push of a button.
Most game companies have blanket TOS/EULAs, to the point they could easily conflict with several jurisdictions they are theoretically being applied.
Cynical me would think it's there if it becomes useful at some point, or to scare away casuals trying to do something they don't approve even if not necessarily illegal.