Hey there again. I know now at least one person reads these blogs and finds them interesting, so on we go with another look at what's under the hood at DBolical...
Video Names
Coming up with headings is half of the time that goes into these blog posts. Now imagine how much time gets spent thinking what a video or editorial is gonna get called! Whipping these bad boys up takes a lot of effort, and especially when I'm contacting the mod creators involved to share the video but also give their thoughts on how it's all coming together (script, footage, so on). Last week didn't see a lot of editorials, save for the one big one - The Top 5 Mods To Play With Friends on ModDB.
This was a "fun" video to make. First off, I wanted to try and get footage with at least one other person for all of the mods on this list - otherwise it was a bit of a moot point trying to report on the five mods here. I had a friend who had ACM luckily (the overhaul mod looked really exciting and I wanted to give it a go), and meanwhile I managed to get a friend to be cannon fodder on the Clone Wars Revised section of footage. Finding people besides that was, unfortunately, difficult as my working hours didn't coincide in that particular week with when most of my friends were free. Not to worry, though, because Sven Co-op, QCDE, and Full Invasion 2 all had competent community server support that meant I still got some multiplayer footage together.
Polling Tooth
(Now these are just low-quality puns!)
The polls are going well, though I notice people want more promotion, overwhelmingly. This puzzles me a little, but I recognise it could be a holdover from before I started this job. Since I was hired at DBolical I've doubled headlines, brought back the YouTube, made use of YouTube community posts, turned editorial/mod feature content up to eleven, and even ran more features from community sources like new games added to mod.io and that sort of thing. I've got more in the works - more editorials, more videos, new trailers as and when people offer them up, and so on - but it looks like people want even more promotion. At a certain point, promotion turns into advertising, and people generally have to pay for the latter - so I have to keep in mind it's not my job to sell other people's games for them. What I can do is promote projects that are worth a look, and that's where covering mods for editorials and covering indies for editorials gets a bit muddy.
In case you haven't seen it yet ;)
People aren't (generally) selling mods for money. When I promote mods and visibly come down on one side of the fence as really liking (maybe even endorsing?) a mod project, it's not a monetary thing. I enjoy the mods involved, they're free for everyone, and anyone who likes my recommendation can go and get the mod right then and there, whether they've got much disposable income or not. Indie games are different because an indie developer stands to gain sales and cash off the back of an endorsement - and people may use their limited available funds on an indie game that caught my eye and went in an editorial. Whilst this isn't a hard and fast rule, it's why I've generally stayed away from IndieDB editorial content like this. It helps that ModDB gets around ten times the traffic that IndieDB does and so there's not many people missing out, but I'm concerned, in the long term, about indie developers feeling left out in the cold a little.
That's why the rebranded DBolical YouTube now also allows indie trailers, which I think manages to be "news" and "promotion" as opposed to straight-up advertisement. I've got to consider, too, other ways to talk about indie games in a way that doesn't straight-up advertise them monetarily. Lists for indie games might be a way to go if I'm careful how I word it but, again, ModDB's audience is ten times larger. I'm not sure if IndieDB articles would do especially well, but that doesn't mean I won't give it a go. By the end of this year, expect to have seen a few experiments on the IndieDB side of things to try and give it a resemblance of parity with ModDB's editorial and promotional efforts.
Forward Unto Morn
This week, I have a bunch more editorials planned. One went live today - 5 Battlefield Mods to Scratch Your 2042 Itch - and is a mild innovation on the previous few editorials by focusing almost entirely on the mod content with not much actual news content. "Battlefield 2042 has been delayed" is one sentence, but I still wanted to a. report on it and b. report on the very productive BF modding community on the site. As a result I figured I would also use it as an excuse to talk about the Battlefield Portal, which sounds exciting for UGC and is a bit of good news going forwards for DICE games.
The other two editorials are one about Total War: Warhammer 3's delay (which will feature either 5 great total war mods, or 5 great Warhammer-related mods. I haven't quite decided yet, but I will tomorrow), and also one about THQ Nordic's 10th anniversary. Only problem is, THQ Nordic's latest games aren't exactly renowned for moddability, which ties my hands a little. Hopefully there's at least five decent mods for Nordic's games, or else I won't be able to have an editorial stand on its own two legs about it without just sounding like a congratulatory thing. This is a modding website, after all.
Closing Thonks
As ever, there could be more editorials if there's more news. The next video I'm thinking of is mods that make you think. Stanley Parable is a good example of one - I'd like to touch upon more out-there subjects for the mod count-downs than just genre. I might do genre on occasion as they're easy to research for, but ultimately, I think the more unique themes grab people's attention more, and they're the ones I want to get out there.
As ever, any thoughts, suggestions, so on, let me know down below!
Great that you make all the editorials and news for mods and indies.
But to be honest, i think it's not so effective, guessing that the
peoples who are into modding/mods already follow up their particular genre.
The majority of common players usually have not much clue or interest in mod's,
only if mods going mainstream, like zombies or batlle royal stuff etc.
So, how to display the majority that there is a backdoor to cool mods for their
game?