'Farming Simulator' Postmortem

[Music] Welcome to our talk uh we will talk about um farming cator today uh I'm Christian Aman from chin software this is Stefan gerer we will split the talk in the middle and before we talk um this will be recorded so please mute your cell phone okay we will start with a little introduction myself um as I said I'm Christian Aman I have a masters in um computer science I worked a bit in the video games industry some years for um Sony PlayStation and also for uh envidia as a software engineer uh before I founded chant software with together with Stefan gerer um this is a short intro of Stefan Stefan also has a master's degree of computer science he worked shortly the

sensory motor lab before co-founding chant software 2008 together with me um a short slide about chant software um we are Developer publisher um of the Farming Simulator series we have offices in surk in Germany in C in the Czech Republic and in the US and we develop games for pretty much all platforms that make makes sense uh from consoles to mobile also PC sorry okay um let's just start um um the history of farming simulator um both of us Stefan and me we shared a passion uh for video games and programming and we uh dreamed of developing a game engine and creating video games in Switzerland and that's a

a fun fact um almost 20 years ago we visited together uh the GDC here in San Francisco and that was the point where it decided to to bring this dream into reality so um in 2017 uh a Friend Martin bwolf um suggested us to create um Farming Simulator so he had this idea he was pretty much obsessed by this idea to create this game because he he loved such a game to play and so what we did uh we concluded a bit of research and we also uh launched a web Forum with a um a a small prototype of a Farming Simulator game and through that uh feedback we got and also through market research uh we were convinced that there's a potential and also demand for such a game in the market so this was pretty much the start 200 uh 7 long time

ago um there were a lot of challenges 2007 to enter the games Market as as a fresh uh developer Indie developer so to say um self-publishing uh a video game was a was a major challenge in the past the the the dominant um uh way of selling games was back then still uh physical retail distribution so that was difficult and digital platforms that are available nowadays are very accessible uh were closed to Indie developers so steam was only open for Indie developers 2012 so that was also not possible to to go that route and there is another um big major obstacle to take it was the the game engine itself so um game engines like unity and unreal they were

not accessible at that point Unity didn't really exist and Unreal Engine was too expensive at that point for us to license so those were the challenges we had to overcome um what did we do we tried to search uh a publisher really traditional way of of doing a video games project and we actually found a small publisher uh in in Germany um that that we could do a a contract a distribution deal uh that we also got a small um minimum guarantee for for the contract but the guarantee was so small we could barely um upgrade our Maya licenses to commercial we used Maya for pretty much all the assets of of of the game so that that was the was necessary of course so that's it that was the start uh of of of the development of Farming

Simulator um it was a true independent game development to say so we we lived in in a shared apartment to save costs and we did all everything beside our um day jobs so I was still working for NVIDIA at that point part part parttime and Stefan was um at University finishing his master degree so um it took us about 9 months of development time and we could release the first version um April 14th 2008 and it really uh sold a lot so we sold uh for the first version which was only pretty much sold a physical and only in Europe 250,000 units um and this was really crazy what happened at that time is there was um um the uh a trend of of simulation games

became popular again so in the '90s there was a quite was a quite a big Sher and then around 2008 it was kind of a um research in in popularity in the simulation cha so which is also nice and um we could could helped us to to sell units um go on I will uh now talk a bit about the game design the ideas we have behind the game um of course farming Slater is a simulation game uh so the primary objective is to simulate uh a farming experience per se um so the players are tasked to uh planting and harvesting Corps uh crops sorry um so this also involves uh managing livestock buying and selling agricultural equipment and what we also did from the start we licensed um uh Farm Brands to

put into the game like John Deere and other brands to make the the game as authentic as um possible so next slide um to to create uh simulation game there's um we've we had um to choose between entertainment and realism or authenticity and there was uh it was crucial I think to to to have a a good balance because on on the other hand you want a lot of realism to to make the game as real as possible but we also want to keep the game as fun as possible and that's very important for us to find the right balance also to to to make the game successful in the market and yeah we tried very hard and we think we were not bad at that uh in most cases we favored entertainment so fun was always more important than

realism and I think that was also um something which we did a bit different to other simulation games at the same time that were on the market we we really favored uh entertainment and not realism um influences um yeah we got influences of course by a lot of great games of that time um maybe to mention here is Grand Theft Auto and also Battlefield um there are open world games that was of course for us important to create an open world game um what we also got from those games is was this concept which was pretty much new to simulation games that you can enter and exit the vehicle at any time and um it's important for us that you can then also move around independently of a vehicle and also interact a bit with the with the environment and this gives you this kind

of control of and an immersion um in in the world that you're that you are as the simulation is um I think um this also helped to make the game uh interesting to a younger audience and that's also a huge difference we see compared to traditional uh simulation titles like flight simulator train and Truck Simulator we have a much younger audience um that plays our games and I think one of the reasons is that we added uh newer Fe new features for example that um a bit more about the balance about between entertainment and uh realism so easy to play um game design was a huge priority for us what we did is um certain automation to simplify um certain gameplay mechanics so we tried to reduce the number of button butons that were

used and we also introduced a context sensitive um help system so in all situations uh all the buttons that are are um makes sense to use were showed on the upper left um screen because we had this experience from those simulation games they were great like I just remember falc tree uh a flight simulation game uh but you had to remember like uh one 100 keys to use it and that was just not so practical so that's something we came up and thought yeah that could be cool that you don't need to REM remember all the all the buttons okay what we also did is we of course also added Advanced uh gameplay mechanics because we need to to have a certain depth in the game play and what we did is we add that optionally so it was not for a lot of things is not

mandatory but you still um can have that game play if you want to and this is something we did a lot in the sequels we added more and more complex gameplay but it was optional so you're not uh o obliged to use use them it's free okay um of course yeah we released the game and there was um a lot of feedback some feedback was the game is too simplistic so there were hardcore fans in the community of the game that said yeah you can't make such it's it's a toy game it's not a real simulation game so for example the attachment of the combine uh header so this um bar in the front of a combine harvester it was just one button you attach lower and turn it on and this was too simple and then we went back and make it made it a bit more complex and there were other um elements that we also had to to change

or adapt um in the end user feedback was always very very crucial and still is is today for us um to to to to to develop the game further and and to decide which is important which is not for for the game that was uh from the start even before the first version was released we got feedback and and and were able to even with the first videos we released we could incorporate feedback from the community into the game which is quite cool um yeah so to say um so the rest of the talk we have um the we will talk about the three defining uh features of a farming cator career mode a modding and also multiplayer career mode we introduced pretty much from the beginning um of the series in 2008 um the ability to mod was in the first iteration with we enhanced it

quite substantially with the second version and multiplayer was um introduced in the third iteration 2010 so let's um talk about career mode and the career mode in Farming Simulator adds progression and and challenge so so the player can start with with with basic farm equipment with a small amount of money and then gradually build his farm and earn more more money to purchase larger and more powerful Farming tools and so on the mode um was at that time quite unique among simulation games and I think um the important part is that it adds a level of progression and goal setting that that was not present in other games at that time simulation games at that time so that was I think uh an important uh part of the success um

what what was the inspiration of the career mode so there are two uh things that inspired us uh first um RPG games that have this kind of leveling up um or experience points and skill trees but also like in sports management games uh you see uh economy management that is also an inspiration to us and those uh elements they're kind of a natural addition to to to the whole theme of of of this of this game uh in farming um and I think it adds a lot of Engagement and realism because Farmers they need to manage their their equipment and their farm and there's also of course financial management so they need to see if they have enough money to buy certain equipment or exchange certain equipment to bigger equipment that's just the natural part of of a farmer's daily life

so for us this was important to to to get this full spectrum of farming into the into the game and as I said this was um not found in other simulation titles at that point um another element that um is really interesting to talk about is the the micro gameplay uh of the game so the micro gameplay is really when you work on the field you you go the lanes of the field go up and down to cultivate to plow to seed or to harvest or there's also like if you sell Goods you have to drive to a selling point and then sell the goods this is something uh we quite early we added so-called AI workers that will do those jobs because driving up down the field for hours is maybe a bit boring uh as a game uh in the long term so we automation mechanisms into the

game uh to to to not that you don't have to do that yourself so you can hire workers and then they will do the work for you it costs a bit of money of course but they will do the job for you so this is interesting in contrast to the micro gameplay so if you have um the micro gameplay so so to say automated you can concentrate on on the macro level and this is something that you see a good example is factoral where you have um a low-level gameplay um mechanics layer and then as soon as you have figured it out you can and concentrate on a more higher level of of the game play and and and play there so this is this is very very similar to those um construction and management simulation games like Factoria and others so that's um quite an interesting

um fact okay um this is already the end of my part we will switch over to um Stefan yeah so let's get into another very important aspect of the game which is modding so basically we kind of grew up around some of the biggest modding successes like like Counter Strike and defense of the agents and and other big titles that were pretty popular with modding like Battlefield and on tournament so for us it was kind of natural that modding needs to be part of the game as well because we also see kind of all the benefits from it that uh kind of gives the players that long-term playability and having the options to fully customize their game to to what they like it and also it kind of gives a

lot of free content for us because we've not been able to or probably no company is able to produce that much content that uh the Comm Community is able to so to give you a short um uh view what the kind of the modding is in in farming solat I have a short video that kind of shows a couple mods like of course there's a a lot of kind of realistic mods that try to more new vehicles I had add the kind of that realistic side of the game there's also completely new maps uh that uh that people can create mostly they're kind of dedicated to a specific area that they live in like here is is

one uh in in the US in Michigan and also completely new gameplay features like here where you have a very uh dedicated tool to fully optimize all the game play with very specific features some some other stuff like uh police uh and then and certain rescue vehicles that kind of completely change the game away from farming also some fun elements as well uh they also added uh excavators in the game and some very fun stuff as well uh also like yeah content very kind of dedicated to kids as well with like very colorful stuff

so well how did we achieve that so with uh the first version of farming Slater in 2008 uh we didn't really have time to implement a lot of modding specific features uh but we very focused on being as modding friendly as possible so we've chosen open formats uh XML based and and also used kind of industry standard formates like DDS for texures so so the tools already exist to author them and also we released our internal development tools like uh DCC exporters for our uh uh mesh formats and also our

level designers that uh people could create new maps with primarily and also we wrote most of the gameplay code in Lua so that was fully accessible for the moders to change and adjust and and also add new gameplay features well with Farming Simulator 2009 we've had more time to actually improve that system so what we introduced was kind of a model mod system where uh people uh or the moders would put their mods into a a zip file and people would simply put them in a known folder so they no longer have to change the game installation and kind of manually merge different mods and and whatever so that made it very much simpler for the for the the users and also so uh the maps are now

automatically detected and shown in the selection and uh the vehicles and Equipment uh would be shown in uh the in-game farming shop so you can just buy them directly uh with no no actual manual adjustments uh but we also restricted the access to the Lua script uh the reason for that was uh with the the previous open concept it was very very hard to to have multiple mops installed side by side I mean people would have had to to kind of manually merge those luas scripts and so what we instead did is kind of provide a couple dedicated apis to the moders that they can can use to extend and change the uh the scripts so to hopefully reduce those those conflicts between them

mods with uh Farming Simulator 2011 uh we introduced multiplayer in the game which I'm coming to uh in a second as well but uh it also meant uh that we wanted to add mod support in multiplayer as well so one key aspect for us was to make sure that kind of the matchmaking is not compromised by by the mods so other players couldn't couldn't destroy the experience of others so uh what we made sure is that the uh clients need to have installed the same mods as the ones on the server and also the mods would only be activated when you would join a game so only at that point when the server already said okay I'm using those mods I'm sure those are fine for me that's also when the clients would

actually activate them and of course it also meant that all the mods had to be uh multiplayer aware especially the script code that uh introduced new uh States had to be adjusted so the uh the states is properly sync in multiplayer as well one big issue we kind of always faced so far at at that point was the mod distribution so by then we didn't have any any Solution on our side so we left that up to the moders to distribute those mods to the players and that often resulted in kind of very unuser friendly download sites kind of covered with uh ads and where you can barely see where you actually need to click to download um there's also been uh fake download sites that distributed Mare and

stuff and uh also one big issue was uh that people started to download other people mod mods and re-uploaded them to a different site so they could earn a bit of money and that that was always a big big issue in the community and from the user perspective as well uh is of course the quality and insurance that wasn't guaranteed at all right so you would download the model and you have no idea if it's even going to work or completely destroy your safe game so the solution we came up was the official mod hop that we introduced in uh 2012 so the idea about that was to really kind of have one source of quality mods um so but moders were still hesitant to actually use that system

because um to kind of guarantee the quality we had to uh introduce a couple restrictions in terms of quality and also because it's kind of an official thing from our side we also have to guarantee that there's no licensing issues there's no age restriction issues ETC so not all mods uh are actually possible possible to be submitted to the modop and also one big factor was the potential loss of of that end revenue from from mods [Music] so it wasn't really uh that much used but uh we really seen a big shift in uh Farming Simulator 17 mainly due to kind of three changes that we made so the first is that we integrated the mod Hub into the game

directly so before people had to go to our website and download the mod there and install it manually and uh with foring elator 17 it is now directly possible to downloads from within the game with basically one button click also uh we introduced the rewards program so we do pay the moders based on the the uh kind of the popularity of their mods so that that's actually going to be a couple thousand bucks a month for for the most uh popular mods so there's even yeah some teams that kind of work uh almost professionally for those those mods now uh also kind of interesting now that uh with the talk from from Wednesday that un will uh epic also

introduced that for their fortnite creators mode kind of a similar concept so um and then the last thing was uh the mod support that we've been able to finally introduced to to our PlayStation and Xbox versions we're uh kind of really proud to to be one of the very first game to actually support that and uh but of course there's a a couple technical restrictions as well on that like there's uh no option to compile shaders on those platforms and and also we're not allowed to uh ship custom scripts there and also one big restriction is that all the content on those platforms need to be created so the only option to actually get mods on the consoles is to go through the modop uh but it's also very important

for us to kind of keep the uh external mod support on the platforms where it is kind of possible because yeah there there's still a ton of mods that would never go through the modop restrictions that we have so to kind of show the progression on on the success of the mop there's a couple numbers so with Farming Simulator 15 where we first introduced it we kind of got around 300 mods with around 1 million downloads and then with farming 1 we reached about 2,000 mods with over 500 million downloads and then with forming Sim simulator 19 we uh now have around 6,000 mods with with more than 1 billion downloads in total and a farming simulator 22 even though it's just out for for about a year already reached similar numbers to Farming Simulator 19

as well some other kind of considerations for the mod support uh is uh that it's very important to kind of keep the modding as simple as possible so we spend a lot of time on documenting our systems and writing tutorials we've also been uh able to partner with Wy to to produce a forming simulator from Mar's book um also it's important to kind of keep the amount of changes from version to version as small as possible so people are not uh forced to kind of relearn everything every couple years and also to kind of keep the amount of mods uh as as large as possible because uh it's always a bit of a hassle for players to lose all all

their content when they switch to a new version so um for the changes that we had to make we tried to kind of keep a fallback support for all mods still or in in the cases where that was not possible we we also rot converted tools like when we restructured some XML files or uh when you change our binary formats texture formats Etc so so that uh there's as little work needed by the moders as possible and of course having our own engine was also very huge benefit for that because we're able to really plan the changes we're doing and and also uh kind of time them perfectly with new releases so especially when we're doing updates from one version within the game uh would be very big issue if suddenly Mo formats would change as

well also it's kind of very important to um keep kind avoid any kind of logged in third party Solutions um like um if you would go with like a steam only solution or so that would would really prevent uh providing mod supports and consoles and also uh it's very important to kind of have a very optimized QA and and submission process in the Moda because yeah we've now uh kind of QA more than 6,000 mods within year to to to ship them to to the players uh another thing we did to kind of uh enforce people to create more mods we uh we had multiple more coton T tests in the past as well so like here was an

example in 2017 we we had uh a total price pool of over 50,000 mods uh 50,000 uh Euros so um with a couple nice uh uh gpus and and also like the winner of the contest uh would have the option to partner with us to create a paid commercial deal see so where they they will get a refer a share from from that as well because mods are free so so there's no direct Revenue except for for the reward but uh the DLCs that we sell uh obviously get get an even better reward so let's get to a another topic which is the multiplayer mode so the first two version that we single player only but uh We've

we've seen a very big potential in multiplayer so like farming in real life is also a very big teamwork effort there's even processes that are not possible to do on your own like uh chopping uh uh mice which is um uh where you have like a the the chopper is not able to basically uh capture all the chaft so you need to have a tractor with a trailer next to you driving all the time where it can immediately unload that also we've seen a lot of requests from the community that that really would have liked to see that in the game and uh We've also seen a very big competitive Advantage as well because most of the simulation games at that time didn't have multiplayer so with farming simulated 2011 we uh implemented a Cooperative

farming mode um with up to eight players so you would uh manage one Farm together on on one map and uh We've Chon chose kind of a server uh client model where one of the players would host the game and and or could join Direct play um also the mode was played mostly with rents I mean technically it's it's also possible to just have random people playing together but uh yeah with Cooperative playing it's always a bit tricky to have uh random people so uh one other thing we introduced in uh 2013 was a dedicated server support so with that selfhosted system that has

always been kind of an issue with uh the network performance and back then like even one megabits of upload was kind of a luxury so that was always a bit tricky for the player experience so uh having having a server in the data center obviously uh helped a lot for that and but it also gave uh several kind of gameplay benefits as well so now with a server running all the time you could also have kind of a continuously simulated world so you no longer tie to uh one of the players hosting the game and and then it would only be running at that point and also you could uh now uh have multiple admins for the game because for only the host would be kind of the admin of the game and would have all the permission misss to uh to give rids to

the players and kick and ban them and uh now with the dedicator servers you could have multiple of those which also allowed kind of more public play as well so you could kind of create a bigger community of people that would just randomly play on one world and and share kind of the same same experience with uh farming simat 19 we also introduced new uh concept of having multiple farms uh on on one map so you could have up to eight farms and uh each uh each player would be assigned to one of those farms and each of those Farms would own their own land their own vehicles uh and uh would be kind of playing against the other Farms that kind of introduced also a more competitive play as well

because um you kind of compete with those other farms for resources like land so you probably want to buy the best land uh first before the others can and also there's a uh concept of kind of variable uh sell prices for for your crops so the more you sell the less you get for it so we you probably want to sell the stuff first before the auto Farm can also crossplay uh is something we introduced with Farming Simulator 22 uh as one of the the biggest features in multiplayer so so now you're no longer restricted to just play with people on the same platform and uh but that also had uh kind of the restriction that we now had to provide the same mods

in all platforms so before we've been able to just uh have a set of mods only on the consoles and maybe similar but slightly adjusted mods on PC because uh of of the restrictions on consoles but now we were forced to really guarantee that that the mods are really the same as much as possible and also it's kind of very important to not have any platform specific apis like for n networking or matchmaking also or or also uh before we only had voice chat uh on the console versions but uh now with crossplay for the console players to be able to really communicate with the PC players that was also an important uh thing to actually introduce voice chat as a feat from PC as

well and also there's a kind of a uh restriction that we're not allowed to have any direct connections from the consoles to the PC so um but we still wanted to kind of keep that selfhosted uh concept so we didn't want to force everyone to to uh go through the uh dedicated server concept so uh what we did is uh we introduced a relay server concept so instead of connecting directly to uh from PC to consoles we would connect both would connect to that relay server and all the traffic would be ratted through those um another part uh that is kind of tied to the uh the multiplayer mode but it uh is not directly part of the game

is the our orts mode so 2017 we kind of experimented with some competitive uh modes and we've uh seen a very huge uh advantage in that because most most of the big esport titles are not family friendly so we've seen kind of a big uh potential in that and also the feedback we got from those early experiments were very positive that uh kind of encouraged us to kind of continue with that and develop kind of a full featured orts mode um so in 2019 we had our first Farming Simulator League season uh with like a price pool of over 250,000 dollar and so I've got a short video to to show couple impressions of how that

looks yeah we also work together with uh the big manufacturer Brands so they have their own teams that compete in in the the league and the mode is kind of a 3X3 mode which is uh cover kind of the three concepts of uh harvesting bailing and then selling those Bales in kind of as efficiently as possible

e so well that brings us to the conclusion of the talk well yeah the the franchise has evolved quite a lot over the years kind of our basic strategy hasn't really changed uh we're still trying to kind of be as casual as possible but uh kind of give a kind of uh still give kind of a realistic uh

simulation and also like the modding helps as well to kind of kind of uh solve the balancing act as well because um there's a lot of very realistic forming uh mods out there so core simulation fans can also work with those mods and kind of get their their uh very realistic experience if they like to and also uh the listening to the community feedback helped us a lot to to improve the game over the years as well but uh it's also very important to to know that uh not all of the feedback is really good feedback as well and also a lot of the feedback you hear is coming only kind of a portion of of the game uh of the players especially like um more kind of the uh the core simulation audience is kind of more audible in that

feedback than the Casual players so we also implemented uh features uh into the game where we later realized that it's actually not really a feedback that kind of the Casual player liked so later on in in updates of the game we we also added options kind of to disable those features again uh so so that uh it works better with the play style of those more casual players well yeah I mean for the future we have a lot of ideas that we want to want to do but there's like a couple key points I want to mention here like the immersion that we want to achieve is is not where we would like it to see yet so would definitely see more interactive worlds and also kind of see more story elements with with NPCs and and stuff to

interact with and also the the Esports mode uh right now is still kind of separate from the game and it kind of limits the amount of players that actually use it and that's definitely something we we would love to see more integrated into the game to to get a bigger audience and also one thing uh that is always tricky with Farming Simulator is the the onboarding and also kind of the the the open World style of the game uh kind of doesn't give a lot of guidance to the players so people are often kind of left in a situation where they don't know what they should do next because yeah it's an open world game uh sandbox style where he can do whatever you want but uh it would definitely be beneficial to those to kind of give some guidance what they could maybe try and actess uh so so that uh that fits better to to

some of those players so yeah that's farming slator and uh thank you for for your attendance and um um don't forget to fill out the review forms and uh yeah we're open for [Applause] questions hi I'm uh Frank K from Fable Studio we're working on a an AI Theme Park Builder game and um since I saw this title I've always been curious like why farming right like what is it about farming what other options did you guys consider at the time um and yeah what what sort of check what what was farming checking the boxes of that maybe those other options didn't well I mean before Farming Simulator we actually worked more on like an RPG title um but uh kind of what

convinced us about farming was kind of the broad uh array of activities you can do in farming there's there's so many things that that that you can do and uh and gives us the option to kind of really create a big game quick followup is there a demographic that seems to like the game is it more rural folks that enjoy it or is it you don't see that well it's not not really like if you compare it to like flight simulator or truck simulators or or whatever right that's kids also like those topics as well so that's not very specific to forming but uh I think one one big part of the success is also how we kind of tackled the the simulation CH and kind of try to to give those casual elements as well thank you um I enjoyed the talk a great deal um I

was actually surprised in the beginning to hear that one of your main design pillars was entertainment over accuracy because I usually think of farming simulator as a simulator it's not a harvest moon it's very much a you know a simulation game um in terms of its branding compared to other titles on the Shelf at a GameStop or something like that so I'm wondering given that entertainment over realism is one of your pillars how has Farming Simulator maintained its identity over these years and not branched into things like say having players fall from a flying school bus or zombies walking through your farm you know how have you maintained that Focus while also prioritizing entertainment well I mean kind of the S the realism is kind of still kind of the core concept right so basically what we do is we look at reality and try to kind

of capture reality as close as possible when we actually decide what how to implement it exactly that's where kind of the uh the the gam playay fun comes in right so that's when we decide okay well let's simplify it in a way that it makes fun or maybe leave some elements out to to still be fun right but it's not the other way around where we say well maybe that could be a cool thing that's completely unrealistic and let's build that in right it's still coming from the the realistic side thank you very much hey okay thank you so much for the talk to start with it was super insightful in so many ways um I had a question about when you actually started right at the beginning how did you build up the knowledge base I mean coming up with Farming Simulator there must be so much knowledge that you need to gather and then of course you keep talking about the ENT containment so there's the vulgarization of all of that and make it digestible quite intrigued on how you

approached it and if you had any background in farming before well I mean it it was really tricky definitely uh I mean we kind of both kind of grew up on the count side so farming was was not completely foreign to us um but but yeah most most of the knowledge in the beginning came from from the community so we we had a forum from the very beginning where we had a lot of feedback as well and also a lot of like Wikipedia Etc so to really figure out how stuff is done but uh but later on we also hired several people uh that actually have a farming background as well that that could help on that side that Mak sense thanks a lot uh thank you for the talk uh in terms of your community feedback and Al but also your future what's the uh can you speak to the work you're doing to understand their their their buying

habits their their retention year to year because it's a yearly an annual product you have is there a demand to go to more of a true perennial and Evergreen gas where you just have a core product and you support it on DLC only oh yeah so the question is how kind of the the update cycle of the game is right yeah like what's the demand there from your user base in terms of like are they happy with with the yearly model or is there a a growing uh yeah so so yeah with we always hear feedback from people that they would like to see AAL where we kind of keep the same game and then just continuously updated but which kind of would help for the modding to some degree but it's also kind of the modding that kind of prevents it as well because if we would just continuously update eventually I mean we need to introduce new new uh features like for example with Farming

Simulator 15 or so we switched from Old School textures to bbr textures and and that switch would have been a big issue uh if it was within the same version right so suddenly there's not really a clearly new version but every mod would be broken and uh kind of having that uh new version cycle also helps to kind of clearly dictate okay until that point the mods are mostly compatible but at that point now you need to make sure that the the mods are compatible again okay thank you hi uh I'm the release engineer for Sony platforms at jackbox games and I'm very curious as to how you approached your modding uh uh I guess uh your strategy the one thing about TI like the trcs for Sony is that ugc has to be created on the

platform on a Sony platform specifically so I'm curious as to how you guys uh solve that problem where mods that were developed on a steam or a different console were also being played on a Sony uh platform I run into this issue constantly which is why I'm so curious as to how you guys solve this yeah well so the question is how we kind of solve the TRC issues on on the Sony platform that we uh uh for the ugc that it would have to be created on a platform not externally so so yeah actually mean that was a big discussion we've had with Microsoft and Sony for for a long time and uh we we've been able to kind of convince them with uh Fator 17 that we're actually allowed to do uh the way we're doing it right now and I think a lot uh of that also probably helped that uh the Skyrim uh was was working kind of on a similar

concept at the same time so um but but yeah I mean we that's why we have kind of those those limitations as well right so all the content that goes on on the the the consoles is going to be created on our side and and there's no options for players just to freely install content uh from anywhere that doesn't go through through the the mod hob okay gotch you thank you yeah so thank [Applause] [Music] you