Gaming on PCs, while being quite a bit more expensive (most of the time) than simply playing on a dedicated console, provides two major features enthusiasts can’t get anywhere else: higher performance and supreme customization. For the average Joe, perhaps the latter is something they’d be willing to pass on, but it is arguable that the massive modding communities created for iconic titles like Skyrim and Minecraft are what makes the PC platform so attractive. Not to mention the many famous titles that have been born from modding, like Counter-Strike and Dota, which to this day top the player count charts on Steam. And on that note, today Valve rolled out an update for Steam’s modding platform, Steam Workshop, that allows developers to integrate version control much easier for their mods.
Admittedly, that’s a lot of bravado to introduce what is at least on the surface a very technically-oriented update to the Steam Workshop, but what’s been added here could shape up to be a major quality of life change for the millions of mod subscribers on the platform. There isn’t a source that lists the total subscribers from all workshop pages for that number just mentioned, but it can be surmised handily by peeking at the “most subscribed” category for a sandbox game like Garry’s Mod or Cities: Skylines, where you’ll find the top mods like Prop Hunt or Move It boasting a sub count in the millions.
In the announcement post Valve made, they explain that developers can now attach information about version compatibility to their mods, which builds off of the Beta and Experimental branch testing system they already had in place. What this translates to for users is–so long as a developer is diligent about implementing this version information–it should be a breeze to subscribe to your favorite Workshop items without running into version conflicts. And as PC Gamer also points out in their article on the topic, a game automatically updating and causing save file issues should theoretically be a less frequent problem because of this.