Cloudmodding: Distributed, Decentralized, and On-Demand Game Modification in the Post-Local Era
emerges as a solution. It decouples the act of modification from the player’s local hardware and from the game’s runtime environment. Instead, modding becomes a cloud-native activity: assets are edited in browser-based IDEs, compiled on remote clusters, tested in sandboxed cloud instances, and deployed on-demand to ephemeral game sessions. 2. Defining Cloudmodding: A Taxonomy We propose three functional layers of cloudmodding: cloudmodding
| Layer | Description | Example | |-------|-------------|---------| | | Cloud-hosted mod repositories with automatic dependency resolution. | Steam Workshop CDN, Nexus Mods Collections | | Build & Compilation | Remote servers that compile code/assets without local toolchains. | GitHub Actions mod-builders, Replit game templates | | Runtime Injection | Mod code injected into game sessions running in cloud VMs. | NVIDIA RTX Remix (cloud pipeline), Minecraft add-ons on Realms | | GitHub Actions mod-builders, Replit game templates |