all the "planet" sites are going to end up dead eventually, I know there is ModDB but that's just not the same and is highly unfriendly towards simple mods that aren't total conversions; with NWN2 GOG is getting more and more of the highly mod friendly titles literally years (and in some cases decades) worth of mod content floating around out there.

how about starting up a sister service to GOG for hosting mods? yeah, there would be a cost issue for hardware and moderation, but outside of that it couldn't do anything but help make the games you sell more appealing since customers wold know that not only are they getting the base games but all the user expanded content to go with them (and that said user expanded content wasn't going to go poof at some point in the foreseeable future).

.... on top of that it could also be good marketing to get more games on board when publishers see that tons of mods for their games are being hosted by GOG, but not the games to go with them.

That's a pretty good idea!

A lot of the sub-forums have stickies with mod guides, but it would be kind of neat to have everything 'centralized' on GOG or a sister site. Users could upload and organize mods, patches, etc. for each game.

And it would be attractive for people who like to have things in one place. But I'm not sure if there would be any legal issues or complications.

I would like to see that myself but i don't see it possible due to legal issues.

I like the idea in theory, but on your last point, mods are probably not something that will draw more publishers and games here. With a few notable exceptions, mods are viewed as a necessary evil by most game publishers, but they would really rather they simply didn't exist. Developers seem to have no issues with them, but publishers often look at them as something that actually restricts future sales. Why buy the new sequel when you still have hours of mods to play on the old game? With GOG's products (mostly old and/or out of circulation games), that might not be such a big deal, but since they have been adding newer games, that could become one.

yeah, but at the same time we are talking about mostly pre-DLC era games that for the most part are commercially dead.

here is a good example: maybe Lucas Arts (well, now Disney) would wake the fuck up if suddenly the mod scene for the Dark Forces / Jedi Knight re-exploded ... I know if I was a pencil pushing marketing twit who didn't believe that there was a market for my 10+ year old games, I think I might just reconsider that notion if hundreds of people suddenly started downloading mods for those games (and even began uploading entirely new ones too).

Too expensive. It isn't going to happen. The mods of the world already have homes and the best thing to do here probably is create a thread for a game in its forum that links to them or sources with many of them and try to get it stickied.

Not seeing how it'd help hosting random mods for other games probably not really attracting publishers. But maybe if it's just the mods for games gog has. Maybe as gog is mostly old games with established communities only hosting a few. The top classic or most iconic ones included as extras?

Funding wouwouldn't be an issue; we are essentially talking about a file dump server farm ... just start renting out game servers to cover the costs.

Off the top of my head GOG has Unreal 1&2, NWN 1&2, freespace 1&2, Duke 3D, and Grimrock.

All of which are exceptionally mod friendly and the latter being prime as a headlining title since it is current.

Not to mention the Witcher 1&2 are also mod friendly.

Funding is an issue. Who is going to do all the work to make this happen? And now you want them to rent out game servers too? Who is going to administer and maintain that? Who is going to code all the relevant Web pages, locate and obtain all the mod files, etc., etc.

There's no free lunch. This stuff takes work and that costs money and I don't think the return on investment would be worthwhile myself which I guess is why you don't see them doing it.

I understand it would be a cool thing to have. Doesn't Desura do this? I thought there is some retailer that hosts mods in their client or something. I just don't see it as benefiting GOG as a business all that much versus other things they could allocate their limited resources to. They already have a lot of irons in the fire as it is with things such as a huge catalog of games to create and test installers and fix up shelf Web pages for, for all the titles they want to sell to Mac customers, they have forums that still need fixing, and I'm sure other stuff we do not know about on top of their current day to day operations, weekly sales promos, new releases, etc.

In any case, you could put this on the official wishlist I guess and see it if gets any support. I don't mean to be harsh but I didn't think this was a particularly viable idea.

Maybe I'm wrong. I guess Steam has begun hosting mods for certain high profile games. It still seems a little early in GOG's life to get into something like this with so many other fish to fry.