(We originally posted this in 2020. You can read more of our original ideas in our archive.)
Problem: Downloading and implementing mods vary from game to game, platform to platform, and console to console. It’s a difficult and specialized process that often can lead players to be banned from the games that they love to play.
Solution: Globally, more than 2.7 billion people play video games across the globe. In the Asia Pacific region alone, there are more than 1.5 billion gamers (making it the largest region worldwide). Overwhelmingly, these gamers simply play the games as they are created by the gaming studio; however, occasionally players will download modifications (mods) in order to change the game. These mods can make the game more complex, introduce additional characters, provide new/special abilities, and more.
This business would make it easier to create, share, and download mods from around the world for any game imaginable.
How large, one may ask, even is the modding industry? Three of the current leaders include Nexus, Steam, and Twitch. Each provides a manager profile for downloading and implementing these technologies. As described by PCWorld in their article describing how to install PC mods,
Modding PC games doesn’t follow a universal process. The required steps differ game to game and mod to mod. Generally, modding requires some kind of change to the existing game, such as tweaks to an .ini file or replacing texture files completely. Some mods may need more in-depth preparation, such as decompressing a game’s executable, swapping in some very specific files, and then repackaging it. Most mods will have install instructions in their readme files or on their host sites.
Fortunately, some of the biggest mod communities offer custom tools that greatly simplify the installation process. In the best cases, you’ll only need to click a button and the modding tool does everything else for you.
This business specifically would tap into the modding sub culture to not only offer an easy way to download mods, but also to provide tutorials for creating mods, sharing mods, and avoiding getting banned while modding. The mod community is actually quite large: as described on Quora in 2017,
You can find various statistics for Nexus mods which is currently hosting 207,985 files created for 378 different games. They currently have 62,130 authors (mod creators) with a membership of over 11 million registered users downloading mods (note that they do not require membership to download, but most will because it improves download speed, and it’s free). With more than 1.5 billion downloads to date.
Those numbers are ever increasing. On February 20, 2021 Nexus claimed to “host 294,976 files for 1,219 games from 120,624 authors serving 25,408,376 members with 4,501,919,867 downloads to date. We support modding for all PC games. If you can mod it, we'll host it.” In four years quadrupled the number of games they support, more than doubled the number of users, and tripled the number of downloads. You can see below for their traffic over time.
Of course there are other mod sites out there as well but this business would differentiate by attempting to help users pick and choose specific mods and would automatically filter the site to only the best mods for gamers to download and use. Perhaps, it would even employ specialized engineers to create mods for a paid audience of mod downloaders who would love to access these additional resources and game modes.
Globally, the video game industry is absolutely enormous. As described by GrandView Research, “the global video game market size was valued at $151.06 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.9% from 2020 to 2027.” Even if modding is only 1% of the gaming industry (which is probably a vast under estimate), this business would be playing in a multi-billion dollar space.
Monetization: Subscriptions to the modding service or sales from selling individual mods.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)