  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.
