  Game developers cannot always meet the growing and changing needs of the
gaming community, due to the often already overloaded schedules of developers.
So-called modders can potentially assist game developers with addressing
gamers' needs. Modders are enthusiasts who provide modifications or completely
new content for a game. By supporting modders, game developers can meet the
rapidly growing and varying needs of their gamer base. Modders have the
potential to play a role in extending the life expectancy of a game, thereby
saving game developers time and money, and leading to a better overall gaming
experience for their gamer base.
  In this paper, we empirically study the metadata of 9,521 mods of the 20
most-modded games on the Nexus Mods distribution platform. Our goal is to
provide useful insights into the modding community of the Nexus Mods
distribution platform from a quantitative perspective, and to provide
researchers with a solid foundation for future exploration of game mods. In
doing so, game developers can potentially reduce development time and cost due
to the increased replayability of their games through mods. We find that
providing official support for mods can be beneficial for the perceived quality
of the mods of a game. In addition, mod users are willing to submit bug reports
for a mod. However, they often fail to do this in a systematic manner using the
bug reporting tool of the Nexus Mods platform, resulting in low-quality bug
reports which are difficult to resolve. Based on our findings, we recommend
that game developers who desire an active modding community for their own games
provide the modding community with an officially-supported modding tool. In
addition, we recommend that mod distribution platforms, such as Nexus Mods,
improve their bug reporting system to receive higher quality bug reports.
