These numbers are carried by an increasing number of games expanding their ambition when using mod.io for cross-platform UGC & mod support. Baldur’s Gate 3 has generated more than 250 million mod downloads since launching its official mod support last year. Last month, our friends at GSC Game World extended their collaboration with us, using mod.io to bring mod support cross-platform for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chronobyl. And back in May, we got to reveal our partnership with CD PROJEKT RED, who trusted us to help bring cross-platform mod support to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt later this year. 

More importantly, even our growth isn’t solely carried by new releases. We see the sustained performance for titles years after their release. The VR modding space remains a hyper–active niche for mod.io, with games like Blade & Sorcery, Gorilla Tag, Pavlov, or Downshot each generating hundreds of thousands of downloads daily. These games buck the trends by hitting new highs years after release, once the creativity of their community is encouraged with accessible UGC support, discovery, and community features.

Anno 1800 has been live with mod support for two years, but recorded its best month with close to 1.2m downloads in May, supported by the release of the major modding project New Horizons. More recently, Dying Light 2 Stay Human introduced additional mod support, allowing their creators to share cosmetic mods via their in-game integration. Combined with their UGC Fest, this led to a doubling of their UGC monthly active users, and a more than +1000% increase in monthly downloads. July is not over, and it’s already by far their strongest month in terms of engagement around UGC.

Making UGC Support Easier

Delivering the best set of tools for developers to add UGC support to their game, and bringing a smooth experience to all their players regardless of their platform has been one of our main points of focus as of late. We’ve talked about Component UI and Cloud Cooking in our previous newsletters which solve critical issues when it comes to cross-platform support and in-game integration.

But if you keep up with our Development Diaries on the mod.io blog, you know we’re also working on simplifying the process of making games moddable with a new mod.io UGC Framework, already available in soft launch for our Unreal Engine plugin. And we’ve got some solutions cooking for multiplayer UGC support in both peer-to-peer and dedicated servers environments, as well as some exciting new quality of life functionalities like exportable metrics.

Of course, we’re keeping up with supporting the latest engine versions and platforms. Our new Unity v3 plugin has been updated with full console support and is 2x more performant, and Android support for our Unreal Engine plugin had a major update last month. As you’d expect, we’re already working on mod.io support for Switch 2, available in Q4.

The feedback we get from partners about the quality of our toolset and the increasing ease of mod.io integration has been humbling, with every new update benefiting all of the developers using our SDK & plugins.

Building a home for Creators

Another major focus we’ve set for mod.io this year is to improve our set of tools and services for UGC & mod creators. Our ambition is to offer the best platform for creators to create & share content for their favorite game, as well as manage their community. 

Some of it is providing creators with the tools they expect and are used to, and mod.io has been missing so far. We deployed UGC Collections last month, allowing users to create and share collections of content on mod.io. We’ve also improved our privacy options to give people better ways to define how they want other users to be able to interact with them, and are working to give more options for creators to filter through the noise in their reports. 

We’re also delivering new functionalities for creators, where we want to go further than what they’d expect. Our new Creators Stats dashboard is a prime example, giving an unprecedented level of detail to creators about who plays their content. It’s a first step towards building an all-encompassing & improved Creator Dashboard, a place from which they’ll be able to manage all their content, reports & notifications.

This cannot be achieved without working hand in hand with the top creators using mod.io. Last quarter, we kick-started our Verified Creators initiative. A private community gathering some influential and talented creators using mod.io, and we are now working with them to help us understand their needs better and contribute to the design of future functionalities and tools. 

Meet us at Gamescom 2025

Our biggest event of the year is just around the corner, and as per usual, you’ll find mod.io at the IGEA booth in hall 3.2. We’ll have our dedicated meeting room, lounge area, and our (User Generated) Coffee stand that has come to be renowned throughout the business area for the best flat whites of Gamescom. 

We’re showing up with a full delegation, and it’s the best time to schedule a meeting if you want to discuss your UGC strategy and plans for both live and upcoming titles, how to bring mod support to all your players, and opportunities to explore UGC monetization. Hit us up ahead of the show, and we’ll make sure to schedule a meeting!

Latest Releases

We’ve been super excited for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl to go live with their full in-game integration of mod.io to distribute mods cross-platform to players on PC and Xbox Series consoles. On the VR front, we love seeing more titles adopting modding, such as GORN 2, published by Devolver Digital, or creative puzzle games, We Are One.

We recently simplified building custom in-game UGC interfaces, with our Component UI solutions integrated in the Unreal and Unity plugins. Today, we’ll talk about our new Cloud Cooking service for cross-platform games using Unreal Engine, an elegant and pain-free solution for shipping optimized UGC files across platforms. And on the Unity front, we’re proud to release mod.io Unity V3, a new improved version of our plugin packed with improvements.

New service: Cloud Cooking

For those unfamiliar with Unreal Engine pipelines, cooking is the process through which UE prepares content in order to deliver optimized files for each platform a game is available on (PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, you name it). The cooking process for specific platforms requires appropriate access to their confidential SDKs, so it can’t be run locally by a modder or content creator. This makes it necessary for the game developer to setup some kind of remote cooking process in order for the creators to be able to create content compatible and optimized for consoles.

Simply put, the mod.io Cloud Cooking service solves this for you. Compatible with every version of Unreal Engine, you set up the connection between your UGC tools and our servers. Then, when a creator sends a file for cooking via your editor, the process runs on our cloud infrastructure, and the optimized platform files are delivered directly to mod.io, ready to be approved for release. During the file processing both the end user and studio can follow-up with the status live on their mod.io interface.

Cloud Cooking is a premium service, it’s now available and compatible with all versions of Unreal engine, whether your integration uses our recommended suite of plugins or not. Integration with Unity or custom engines can be discussed upon request. Cloud Cooking is in private preview with selected partners, to learn more about the functionality, pricing and how to integrate our Cloud Cooking solution for your game, reach out to our team.

Unity Plugin: V3 Release

We released a major update of our Unity plugin last month, with a series of new improvements. You can get all the details of what the Unity plugin does in our updated documentation, or directly into our GitHub repository. It includes solutions to connect your game to mod.io, automate the downloading and installation of mods, easily build a custom UGC browsing interface using our Template UI, and even enable our marketplace functionalities for UGC monetization.

This new version includes an optimized mod installing process which greatly reduces download and install times, simplified and more intuitive interfaces, improved modularity and settings, and a new debugging mode. The plugin was rewritten from the ground up to better align with Unity’s philosophies, and makes the integration of mod.io in your project a smooth and pleasant experience. You can get all the details in our dedicated blog article.

Latest Releases

We’re delighted to see more titles starting to use mod.io services! Some notable additions in the past few months with Soulstone Survivors, bringing custom skins to the game using mod.io; Speedway Challenges 2025 support UGC on PC & mobile; and Mix Universe with a highly customized in-game integration using our Component UI solution, showing just how flexible it is.

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2024 was also marked by the release of important and innovative new features for mod.io, with our first UGC monetization solution, the launch of playtime insights which track time spent with mods. Today’s update covers the work we are doing to maximize the accessibility of UGC, and streamline the time it takes to integrate mod.io in your game with our Unreal & Unity plugin using our component UI.

New functionality: Component UI

Integrating UGC and mod browsing in-game is the single most impacting way of developing players' engagement with this content. Our case studies show that above 40% of players engage with mods when they’re accessible in-game, which is an increase of at least 400% compared to relying on third party solutions and manual installation, from data partners have shared with us.

Our goal is to make in-game integration with our Unreal & Unity plugins as easy and flexible as possible, that’s the reason we updated the former UI template with our new Component UI solution. Moving away from a relatively rigid template, our new UI framework functions with independent components working together to allow more flexibility for developers to build and customize their own UI.

The default UI we’ve built with these components is fully customizable, allowing developers to remove and replace components as they see fit. They can also modify the fonts, colors and sizing of each element to create the perfect integration for their game; giving them complete control over the styling and layout of the UI.

You can find all the details about our newUI framework for Unreal, and for Unity, in our Documentation.

Looking ahead in 2025

Improving mod.io for creators is one of our areas of focus for 2025. Fast growth has highlighted improvements required to meet the level of expectations of modders. Our work with partners has already led to changes; for example with moderation tools which have been significantly improved since Baldur’s Gate 3 release, in order to cater to the needs of a project of this size, and provide modders with better tools to interact safely and positively with their community.

Collaboration with partners and our growing community of creators will continue to guide our roadmap. In the first half of the year, you can expect to see the delivery of features that have been missing from mod.io such as mod collections, improvements to creators and teams profiles, and us leveraging the depth of our metrics system to provide our creators with unparalleled depth of information about their content.

If you have feedback or ambitious ideas for UGC in your game - reach out to our developer team to discuss.

Latest Releases

We’ve been delighted to support the launch of official mod support for Ara: History Untold, our first collaboration with Xbox Game Studios; to continue strengthening our position in VR with releases like Mannequin from Fast Travel Games, and to witness the very successful launch of CarX Drift Racing Online.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 in-game mod support (now out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC and Mac) is an advanced benchmark for what can be done in the field. The results align with the game's exceptional nature and Larian’s work. With over 50 million downloads of mods since launch, more than 2000 mods available for PC (and over a hundred curated for Mac & Consoles), and over 40% of Baldur’s Gate 3 players engaging with mods.

Larian Studios built their custom integration using several of our premium services. Our studio SSO solution allows players to sign in using their Larian account and synchronize their collection of mods across all platforms. They built the Baldur’s Gate 3 mod website using our Embedded Web Hub solution, keeping their players within their own domain without relying on a third-party platform. Of course, content approval and moderation across platforms are handled using mod․io dashboards and systems. 

Anecdotally, during launch time, the activity generated by Baldur’s Gate 3 players more than tripled the overall use of our servers and infrastructure, with more than 3 million downloads a day for that game alone. It’s a massive milestone for us to absolutely nail the landing and ensure a smooth start for all of the players seeking mods to enhance and personalize their experience. Overall, the feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive, and we couldn’t be more proud to have been entrusted with this work. With still some polish and improvements, we’re looking forward to supporting the game and our friends at Larian for the years to come!

Commercial Impact of UGC support

Late last year, we commissioned GameDiscoverCo to do some research on how commercially impactful User-Generated Content (UGC) was for games. Using Steam data, they measured the impact of official UGC support on game retention and revenue. We shared this data with partners at GDC and Gamescom, and it's now been published by GDCo. 

We were expecting the results to confirm our belief that adding UGC support would always positively impact a game’s commercial success, and the numbers very much reinforced our perspective. Based on data from the top 1000 games on Steam, the study shows a 23% revenue advantage and a 90% retention advantage after 5 years for games supporting UGC. 

This impact is observed for all games, regardless of genre, even when UGC or mod support is added post-launch. Our dedicated blog article provides more numbers and a detailed analysis of the research's results.

Premium feature: Playtime Metrics

We see a lot of value in better understanding how players interact with UGC and allowing games to build experiences based on these insights. Building on our live metrics foundation, we’re introducing a new premium service: Playtime Metrics. This service allows a studio to not only get live stats on the quantity of UGC downloaded by their players but also on how they’re playing with that content. 

This new system allows you to track concurrent players (CCU) interacting with UGC, the quantity of content they’re playing with, and the duration of play sessions. As soon as the functionality is activated, this data is integrated into your existing mod․io dashboards. It’s a new frontier which opens the possibility to see the impact different types of UGC can have. For example how long do players spend playing custom levels, vs. changing their characters and content skins and settings. Downloads alone cannot tell that story and we believe this feature will be loved by studios and creators because of the new intel it unlocks.

Playtime Metrics is now available as a premium feature and is ready to deploy if you integrate mod․io with our C++ SDK or Unreal Engine & Unity Plugins. We want to refine it based on early adopters' feedback and requests. So, if the possibilities it opens align with your plans, and you’re interested in integrating it into your game, now is an excellent time to contact us! You can also check the Playtime Metrics documentation. 

Latest Releases

Monetization has always been a critical, if challenging, building block in our offer of services. Solving the technical, regulatory and compliance issues to provide a service ready to integrate for any game represented a major endeavor. Now, after more than three years of development alongside other mod․io services, we’re super proud to make marketplace, our first UGC monetization service, available for integration.

UGC monetization isn’t something that every game will pursue. But we’re convinced business models embracing ways for content creators to expand and professionalize their work will be instrumental to the growth of a next generation of games. Today, I’m simply very excited to start that work with some of our partners. 

Introducing Marketplace

An entirely optional service available alongside the core functionalities of mod․io, our Marketplace functionality allows studios and publishers to add a premium UGC store to their game, where content creators and modders can sell content to players. 

It’s a turnkey solution, ready for integration on most platforms; and coming out of the box with a large set of advanced features. Everything related to compliance, security, and payouts is managed by our backend. It’s available globally, allows creators to self-onboard and offers a high level of flexibility for content approval and moderation.

Having a marketplace solution is an important first step for us, but the field of UGC monetization is new and changing; and we plan to offer a variety of options for developers interested in establishing their creator economy. While developing the marketplace, we’re also already exploring more options, from in-game transactions like Roblox, to patronage, or engagement-based payouts like UEFN. If this aligns with your future plans, now might be the best time to talk to us about it. 

Meet us at Gamescom

We’ll be in Köln this month to meet with partners and friends. We’re keen to hear your approach to UGC, and share our latest UGC product updates, including new white label features, creator dashboards which add a ton of self-service flexibility, and updated SDK’s featuring a highly customizable component UI. Together, they streamline your UGC implementation, enable monetization, dynamic metrics and a number of other new frontiers we’re presently exploring.

We’ll be present with our dedicated meeting room and signature User-Generated Coffee cart on the IGEA booth in Hall 3.2 and still have some availability in our schedule, so reach out to talk about how mod․io services can support your plans!

Latest Releases

It’s been great to see Homeworld 3 going live with the first integration of our studio SSO solution; and to see S.T.A.L.K.E.R Legends of the Zone bringing the years of creativity from their creators community to consoles for the first time! And we’re always thrilled to see cool indie games like Quest Master self-onboarding with mod․io.

Something we’ve seen developing, at mod.io as well as among both partners and competitors, is the increasing appetite for UGC and modding coming from brands, including non-gaming entities. It’s, of course, always been a challenge to tackle the UGC question for established IPs, brand safety remains a legitimate concern and challenge to tackle. But as modding becomes more mainstream and extends outside of its original PC niche, we see more and more interest from IP owners to explore the incredible potential of their communities of creators. 

We got our first title using a powerful entertainment brand with Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector from our friends at Black Lab Games and Slitherine Software launching a mod.io integration for their official user-generated content support; allowing their players to create and share maps and campaigns set in the Warhammer 40k universe. 

Maybe even more interesting, and at the forefront of trends we expect to see develop exponentially in upcoming years, we’ve had examples from non-gaming brands. Specifically in the automobile industry, with Edison Motors and EV company DongFeng using Snowrunner and commissioning modders to showcase digital versions of their vehicles in-game. It’s a fascinating use case to see take shape, allowing potential buyers to test-drive and promote their vehicles via video game mods.

Non-gaming brands working to leverage the reach of our medium isn’t new of course, but the democratization and development of UGC offers unique new opportunities to do so in an affordable and disruptive way, by relying on talented independent creators.

Single Sign-On (SSO) for studios & publishers

The vision for mod.io services is to integrate fully and transparently within our partners’ games, eliminating friction for players, and keeping them focused and engaged within the game ecosystem.

SSO using studios or publishers' existing accounts systems is our latest feature pushing further our white label integration. It allows for instant login whether the player is in-game, in a launcher, or on the web where they’re already logged in to the studios’ account system. 

Beyond the obvious user experience benefits, SSO allows for stronger moderation and better metrics by tying mod.io accounts directly to your existing systems. Strengthening your connection with your player community by giving them a reason to sign in and engage with your games to create and explore UGC. Paired with an embedded web hub on your game’s existing website, it moves the mod.io integration entirely into your ecosystem, without your player ever needing to interact with a third-party platform.

Freshly released, Homeworld 3 features our first integration of this feature going live, using Gearbox SHiFT account system for players to log into mod.io. SSO for studios & publishers is part of mod.io premium features, if you’d like to learn more about it, please reach out!

New Developers Documentation

Our documentation was long due for a proper update, so we’re happy to introduce our new developer documentation portal! Updated with consistent and up-to-date documentation for our REST API, C++ SDK, Unreal Engine & Unity plugins, and all our advanced features (Moderation, Metrics, Authentication, Marketplace).

While some content is still being updated, this should already present a significant improvement over our previous documentation. Please reach out to us if you have any feedback or areas where you identify missing information that would be useful to you.

Celebrating a milestone: One Billion Mods & UGC downloads

Earlier this year, we were delighted to celebrate our billionth download using mod.io services; a significant milestone for us, but mainly a testament to the work of all of our partners and on the 160+ games using mod.io!

Latest Releases

Delighted to work with such an incredible IP in Warhammer 40k: Battlesector; take Crypt of the Necrodancer’s modding solution to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch with full cross-platform multiplayer support; and launch our first sequel with Saber and Focus with Expeditions, given the immense success from SnowRunner

It’s my pleasure to kick off 2024 with our first mod.io newsletter. Every other month, we’ll use this format to keep you updated regarding the mod.io product and business, and our thoughts on industry trends where user-generated content is involved.

2023 has been a good year for UGC, and for us at mod.io. We’ve seen an increasing number of AAA publishers embracing UGC integration. And we’ve been grateful to be part of that journey, working with Ubisoft, Gearbox, SEGA, Bandai Namco, Focus and Techland, among others.

As the conversation develops around live games and the challenges of content delivery, and some of the industry's biggest successes continue to emerge from the UGC scene (Lethal Company comes to mind); we see our partners pursuing their investment in UGC as a source for content and innovation.

On the monetization side, we’ve seen Roblox and Fortnite expanding their reach, as well as Bethesda coming back to the field with their Creator Club rebranded as Bethesda Game Studios Creations. We see more and more green flags when it comes to the reaction of creators and communities. We expect 2024 to be a year where vertically focused games demonstrate you don’t have to be a sandbox to build a vibrant creator economy, and have monetization features available for private preview, for studios wanting to take their first step. 

This all rounds up into making the year ahead the most exciting of times for us. We have major projects scheduled for release with full mod.io integration, and some new functionalities to release that will significantly impact our ability to support the ambitions of our partners. We’re confident in positioning ourselves as the go-to white label UGC solution for studios and publishers wanting to expand in the field, with industry leading UGC features, without the challenge of building and maintaining an in-house solution. 

New Metrics Dashboards

In the past few months, we’ve released a series of improvements to our metrics system, with the ambition of making mod.io statistics dashboard truly world class. We’ve been working with the feedback from our partners and creators, to provide improvements, new sources of data and features that bring day-to-day value to the teams working with them.

mod.io metrics now allow you to extensively monitor and report on the UGC activity surrounding your game including: content pipeline reporting, active creators, subscribers growth, and of course all the existing information on user activity, content, downloads and trends. Whether you need a quick overview of activity for reporting, or to dive deeper and identify specific patterns and behavior, our dashboards got you covered with up to the minute updates.

It’s also been built as a tool for community management and moderation, with detailed health statistics to monitor content reports and actions taken, complementary to our existing moderation and reporting tools. It now features extended ways to identify successful content and creators for your game, so that you can get meaningful insight, not just high level reporting.

Next up from us, will be a real time data feed so you can overlay metrics in your own BI systems, and the introduction of playtime and CCU tracking. This will allow games to go beyond download counts, and measure how much time their players are spending with UGC. To see our metrics dashboards in action, check it out via your game admin dashboard, or reach out to our team for a demo. We’re happy with how it’s evolved, but are looking for your feedback to bring further improvements, and make it a tool that brings value to all our users. 

For more detailed information, you can check our latest blog update.

Unreal Engine 5, Plugin & support

One of our focuses last year was to improve mod.io Unreal Engine Plugin, and keep up with the latest updates for the engine. The plugin allows for hosting and install of UGC in game with mod.io, and provides UI for mod discovery, installation and collection management, as well as a C++ and Blueprint interface around the mod.io SDK, and it’s of course supported for all platforms. 

We’re now fully compatible and available for versions up to UE 5.3. The latest changes came with some major improvements to performance and stability for the UI as well as improved game controller support. 

The new out of the box plugin UI should already feel like a major improvement; but everything is, as per usual, also fully customizable to match with your game’s UI and brand. We’ll have some great examples of Unreal Integration releasing soon, such as Homeworld 3 from our friends at Black Bird Interactive and Gearbox in May. In the meantime, if you want a walkthrough of the mod.io UE Plugin, reach out and we’ll show you what can be done.

Meet us at GDC!

Next up we’ll be heading to San Francisco for GDC, and would love to meet, catch up, show you the latest features that we’re not entirely ready to disclose in this newsletter, and discuss business opportunities. Reach out to our team.

Latest Releases