We brought 15 mod authors to Gamescom.
This was a first for us. Every year we show up to Gamescom with a booth, a team, and a lot of meetings, and almost all of those meetings are with game studios. This year we did something different: we invited authors from the CurseForge community to come with us, and made them the reason we were there.
Fifteen authors said yes and made the trip. Between them they cover Minecraft, World of Warcraft, ARK: Survival Ascended, Hogwarts Legacy, and Hytale, and they flew in from six different countries.
Here's what the week looked like.
🤝 One-on-one meetings
Every author who came got a dedicated meeting with our team. Not a booth demo. An actual sit-down conversation about what they're building, what's slowing them down, and what they want from the platform next.
In every single case, this was the first time we had put a face to a name after years of working together through Discord and support tickets. And they turned into the most useful product conversations we had all week.
🍻 The authors dinner
We invited every author we met with for a dinner with our team.
This part we cannot take credit for. Authors who had only ever seen each other's names in a changelog spent the evening comparing notes on mod loaders, tooling, and the specific pain of maintaining a project across game updates. Minecraft sitting next to World of Warcraft sitting next to ARK.
If you have ever wanted proof that the modding scene is one community rather than a set of separate ones, it was that dinner.
🎉 Happy hour at the booth
Every author was also invited to our booth happy hour, alongside studio partners, developers, and everyone else passing through. It was crowded, it was loud, and it was the correct amount of both.
🔍 What we're taking home
A few things we heard more than once, from more than one game:
- Maintenance is the tax nobody sees. Keeping a project alive across game updates, and keeping several versions supported at once, eats more author time than building anything new does. This came up in almost every conversation, across every game.
- Disclosure around AI. Authors raised the need for clear disclosure, which echoes conversations we are already having internally.
- Discovery matters more to authors than we tend to assume, and they shared opinions about how it should work.
- Authors want to talk to each other more than they currently get the chance to.
We're not going to pretend a week in Cologne turns into a roadmap by itself. But it changed what we're prioritizing, and it will show up in the work.
❤️ Thank you
To every author who took days out of their life, got on a plane, and spent them talking to us: thank you. Genuinely.
We're doing this again next year, and we want it to be bigger.
If you're an author and you want to be in the room next time, come hang out in the CurseForge Authors Discord. That's the server where this starts, and it's where we talk to authors day to day.
