The hype for MultiVersus is still strong, starting with the ecstatic launch a few weeks ago. The game has a lot to offer fans of Warner Bros.’ absurd IP collection, and with news of more characters on the horizon, it looks like they’ll have more to look forward to. Even so, for a large portion of the player base, the game has matured. These creatives, artists and members make up the MultiVersus Modding community.
However, the future of this community and all the momentum it gains due to the popularity of platform fighters and the allure of what they’ve created is uncertain. This is thanks to an increase in copyright strikes for published video content featuring mods, the main way creatives use to show off their mod work.
One such modder, after Duelist Online, which started modding about four years ago, they created skins for Monster Hunter World, then moved on to Guilty Gear: Struggle and Final Fantasy 14 after gnashing their teeth. They first got into MultiVersus after receiving alpha testing code before release, and started their modding project after meeting others on modding site Gamebanana.
“I would say this community is getting more and more popular,” J said on Twitter DM. “The Discord server for the MultiVersus mod already has over 1000 members and growing, and the server has only been around for a few weeks now. Also, some of the big names in the Guilty Gear Strive scene like UltiMa647 and Aeryn are there now. The community is quite Friendly, despite a lot of meme stuff”.
Like many others, they threw their hats into the MultiVersus modding ring with early LeBron James skins, a throwback to an old joke in which people were tearing down LeBron James for the Space Jam movie. Doll’s head.
“As far as I can tell, people have been very positive about it – I haven’t seen anyone speak ill of it. Not to mention the other day when my phone’s notifications were going crazy because of how many people were tweeting Like this mod, or retweet it.”
It also goes beyond hobbyists: some people who have their own channels dedicated to creating mods for video games have also joined MultiVersus. Enter Ghost, a modder with over two years of experience creating game projects, starting with Smash Ultimate, then moving on to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Party Superstars, Pokemon, and more.
“Oh, of course I knew I wanted to modify it!” they explained. “I almost always try to tinker with a game I love, and seeing this game was built with Unreal Engine 4, I knew tinkering would be easy to set up! Then when LeBron was announced, I knew I had to drop everything, for sure Modify the game.”
As for why it exploded so quickly, Ghost gave us their take on the proliferation of fandom. “Multiversus is new, free, has a lot of players (as far as I know, it’s the best fighting game on Steam), and is easy to modulate, all of which add up to help get modders’ attention. Sadly this also means that a lot of low quality mods are/will be made, but that doesn’t stop it from getting really good mods. Luckily, Gamebanana is the current main site where we upload our MultiVersus mods, It provides great categorization options so people can see the most/best downloaded mods and weed out low-quality mods.”
However, brought recent concerns about the DMCA strike, and this positive prospect of creating mods for the game disappeared. Game director Tony Huynh confirms that streaming with modded clients could lead to a strike, which throws the whole scene into chaos. Currently, the moderators of the MultiVersus modding discord recommend against streaming or uploading videos of yourself playing the mod.
“It doesn’t surprise me, but I’m still very frustrated with WB doing this. I’ll still make mods, but I definitely won’t make any videos of them,” Ghost said. “Obviously they know that people love skins, so it was really fun for us to be able to make our own skins. For games like Smash, people like to make videos or stream them with mods to help them stand out. Some of the skins are completely new characters, It can also help people take on roles that aren’t in the game, and may never get into.”
“It’s pretty much an unspoken rule for any game that has modding, but people don’t modding in paid content. Games like League of Legends have mods, and as long as the skin isn’t a paid skin that’s placed on top of the default skin, No problem. League has been using mods for years and players still buy their amazing skins. Videos on youtube and twitch streams of Smash and League with custom skins won’t hurt anyone. So WB (or Anyone who is removing the content of this mod) really stinks to stop people from being creative.”
So we’re in this dark, uncertain future when it comes to MultiVersus mods.although Tony Huynh says he intends to speak to the team managing the DMCA takedown, we haven’t heard of any changes to that process. While sites like Gamebanana have been hosting MultiVersus mods and people are still creating mods for the title, these outages have definitely been slammed. Whether this will get better or worse remains to be seen.
For more MultiVersus content, check out our article on the big overhaul of MultiVersus hitboxes, and our list of MultiVersus tiers!
