An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of Popular Minecraft Mods
Daniel Lee, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Dayi Lin, Mohammed, Sayagh, Cor-Paul Bezemer, Ahmed E. Hassan

TL;DR
This empirical study analyzes 2,228 Minecraft mods to identify features associated with popularity, revealing that high-quality descriptions and community contribution are key factors in successful mods.
Contribution
The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of 33 features across five dimensions that distinguish popular from unpopular Minecraft mods, offering insights into mod popularity factors.
Findings
Popular mods have better descriptions
Community contribution correlates with popularity
Certain features significantly explain mod popularity
Abstract
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),…
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