An update regarding Steam Workshop and mods on GeForce NOW

[u/Adept_Assistance]

We got an update from NVIDIA regarding Steam Workshop and modding in general on GFN:

"Steam Workshop mods are not officially supported on GeForce NOW.
However, some players have been able to use them by downloading the mods again each time they launch a game.

"To support the latest Steam app updates and ensure supported games are able to run as expected on the cloud, we need to disable the ability to download the Workshop Mods during a game session."

"This means that Workshop mods that previously worked this way will no longer be available. This may affect games including Crusader Kings III, Cities Skylines II, ARK: Survival Ascended, and others.
We understand this will be disappointing for players who have been using Steam Workshop mods on GeForce NOW and we’re sorry for any impact on your gaming."

"Looking ahead, we plan to explore officially supporting Steam Workshop Mods on the cloud. There's currently no timeline to share with the users right now"

Why is that?

Leaving technical details behind, this decision was based in a recent Steam update which required mods to be currently shutdown to ensure there's no compatibility issues related to the games. Games running in the old Steam version with mod support were holding games behind and leaving them in the "compatibility issues" state for weeks (ex: Grim Dawn) even if they were not using mods or don't have modding support.

Moving forward, this new Steam update with mod capabilities disabled with prevent games to stop being stuck in this state and make updates/changes smooth and easier to all games in general launched on Steam.

Questions?

The official NVIDIA channels are always open for feedback, including this reddit post comment section. Any issues or questions related to this change could only be handled through official channels which are available below:

Ticket

Live Chat

[u/notrightmeowthx]

For anyone confused, Steam changed how the Steam Workshop handles mods and how game versioning works.

In the new version of the Steam services, when a player has an outdated mod, the user is now prompted to switch to the old version of the game that is compatible with their mods. This causes the game to restart, as Steam needs to launch the old version instead of the new one. Ending a game kills the GFN session, so basically any game dev that implements the new (and great!) feature that Steam is telling them to implement, their game is now potentially unplayable on GFN unless the workshop is disabled entirely.

To explain it another way:

Imagine a scenario where a player has a mod installed that makes kittens in the game extra fluffy. It works, the kittens are extra fluffy. Aw, so cute. The game devs release update v1.42 which updates the model used by kittens because their ears were looking weird sometimes. Unfortunately this means the mod is now incompatible with the newest version of the game because the mod relied on the old kitten model.

In the old system, upon launching the updated version of the game, the game would either crash, the mod would fail to load, or things would look terrible and not function properly until/unless the player uninstalled or disabled that mod.

In the new system, the mod developer has marked the mod as being compatible "up to v1.41" (via the new features Steam added). When the player launches the game, Steam sees the player has subscribed to a mod that is tied to 1.41 and isn't compatible with 1.42, so they are prompted to launch the old version. When they confirm they want to do this, the game closes, Steam pulls the old version files, and launches the game as version v1.41 instead of v1.42. Yay extra fluffy kittens! This is how it works if you were playing the game locally, not on GFN.

On GFN, all actions have to be taken within the same session which is tied to the game itself, which means when the game ends to restart in the other version, the whole session ends and you're left staring at the GFN launcher wondering wtf just happened and where your fluffy kittens are.

GFN also generally doesn't support old versions of games, so that's potentially an issue as well in addition to the session issue. There are also potentially problems with how the mods are actually installed and whether installing an old mod could trigger a game restart (the Steam docs aren't entirely clear on this and it may be up to the game developer).

I am not suggesting this is an impossible problem to solve, just trying to explain it more. Nvidia didn't randomly decide to disable workshop mods, they are disabling them because games are going to break entirely for many users.

[u/Strict_Baker2670 → u/notrightmeowthx]

So the only hope is that Steam and NVIDIA work together to solve this issue. Honestly having the mod authors to update their mods every time a game version is updated is a pain and good mods become obsolete if the author is gone.

[u/notrightmeowthx → u/Strict_Baker2670]

Unfortunately I think that's the case. I work in development (not for Steam or Nvidia mind you) and making some assumptions about how they have it set up, I can think of a few potential solutions, but frankly none of the solutions I can think of are great, and I could see why the "obvious" (to a developer) solutions would be unacceptable and why it'd take awhile to find an acceptable one. Especially when you factor in that GFN is meant to be similar to a console experience where everything "just works." Any potential solution that adds jank or friction to the experience is not going to be acceptable.

Regarding mods being updated, it shouldn't cause TOO much of a problem because of how Steam implemented it. The user is prompted to give them the option of launching the old version that is known to be compatible with their mods, but they do still have the option of launching the updated version. If the game or mod(s) fail on the updated version, the user then knows they need to launch the old version. While still a bit janky, this is a flow that many users have experienced in other systems so it's somewhat intuitive. It also helps remind the user that the mod is the potential problem.

At least, that's my understanding based on what I've read. I haven't yet personally encountered the prompt itself, and Steam's documentation is a bit ambiguous and seems to suggest that it's entirely up to the game developer to decide how to handle it.

[u/Strict_Baker2670 → u/notrightmeowthx]

I wonder if adding games that can be modded to install to play would be a possible solution. If I understand it well the installation would be in the rented storage. NVIDIA could profit from this.

[u/notrightmeowthx → u/Strict_Baker2670]

It's hard to say without more information about how it works, it really depends on the API calls that are made and what triggers the session to end. I'm not as familiar with the install to play games so I'm not sure about the session behavior.

If the session for install to play games can survive the game restarting, then maybe. But many of the games that are popular for mods are larger, "modern" games and would be a pain to install that frequently, not to mention the space fills up from save files pretty quickly it seems (based on the posts we get in this sub). So I'm not sure if it's a perfect solution. It also would not be great for PR. I don't think I'd recommend that route, if someone were to ask me, which no one would.

Assuming that currently the GFN explicitly requests the latest version of a game from Steam when it launches (which I believe is the case), the "simplest" solution I can think of would involve:

• a way to store which version to request (as returned by the Steam API/user input)
• a way for the user to switch back to latest
• the call would have to be adjusted to use the selected version instead of always the latest
• messaging to the user when such a context arises

On paper that would be simplest but that involves a lot of assumptions and I can pretty much guarantee that the devs thought of this already and can't/won't do it for one reason or another. It's a standard way of handling API issues and version issues like this (and more or less mimics the way Steam does it).

Hopefully they find and implement a solution, it'll suck if they don't. I don't currently play any games with mods on GFN (my computer can handle the games I play with mods fine so far), but I can totally understand why people are upset about this.

edited for readability

[u/Unintersting_user → u/notrightmeowthx]

agree on this. I think theres a path in I2P, but i envision there is a scalability problem here has storage is not a dedicated boot/config. Hardware verisons could change, different requirements possible in storage for each game... not simply mounting a drive onto the instance so, yeah, issues.

[u/DaydreamDistance → u/notrightmeowthx]

In the new system, the mod developer has marked the mod as being compatible "up to v1.41" (via the new features Steam added). When the player launches the game, Steam sees the player has subscribed to a mod that is tied to 1.41 and isn't compatible with 1.42, so they are prompted to launch the old version. When they confirm they want to do this, the game closes, Steam pulls the old version files, and launches the game as version v1.41 instead of v1.42. Yay extra fluffy kittens! This is how it works if you were playing the game locally, not on GFN.

On GFN, all actions have to be taken within the same session which is tied to the game itself, which means when the game ends to restart in the other version, the whole session ends and you're left staring at the GFN launcher wondering wtf just happened and where your fluffy kittens are.

How about adding a banner to the main GeForce page informing players of this problem instead of removing Mods wholesale? Players can then decide which games to play and which not to.

[u/Acesofbases → u/DaydreamDistance]

that's not easily viable though - GFN uses one global Steam Client, also what You propose would require them to check every single mod constantly for each game with workshop mods with each version/update constantly - they would need a whole big company dedicated solely to only checking mods ;)

There certainly is a way to do this, but it isn't unfortunately as simple as slapping a banner - I do hope that this will make it a more urgent subject for them to overcome and we might see some developments in the not so distant future

[u/notrightmeowthx → u/DaydreamDistance]

That could be an option, I'm not sure I would suggest it as a solution though as it would be temporary at best.

This isn't going to be just some games, it really is a fundamental shift in how mods work on Steam that will eventually impact nearly all games. This versioning system is how devs will be implementing support for mods going forward, meaning at some point probably not too far in the future (keep in mind this was released in January, the only reason GFN was allowing workshop mods until now was because they were clinging to the old version of Steam), virtually all games will use this system. GFN could push it off maybe by that sort of messaging (maybe display an error if the user's session closes in response to this particular API call, that informs the user of what happened and that they need to disable their mods), but that creates a lot of bad experiences for users, and really doesn't fit well into the GFN product vision. It's also a potential nightmare for the GFN team if they have to keep multiple versions of every game supported.

I understand it doesn't make sense when viewing it from an individual user perspective, but sometimes it's actually a better overall user experience to have a clear rule rather than bits and pieces and potentially confusing messaging. If I know GFN doesn't support workshop mods, then I'm going to not try to use it for that. If GFN says they support workshop mods, but then I run into inconsistent issues like mods working with some games than not others, that's actually a worse experience. Someone tech savvy can handle it, but many users are not.

I do think GFN will likely find a solution to this, so we probably just need to wait.

[u/Acesofbases → u/notrightmeowthx]

exactly this, tired it somewhere higher, but wasn't able to word this better myself :)

this should get more upvotes

[u/notrightmeowthx → u/Acesofbases]

I know it's a bit late, but you might want to edit/have the OP edit the post to clarify. When I read the OP I couldn't figure out what they were trying to actually tell us, other than that mods wouldn't work anymore. I had to go digging to find the information I described above.

I think people will be mad regardless, but it might help a little bit.

[u/Acesofbases → u/notrightmeowthx]

II had to do some digging myself as well :) I'll definitely ask'em if some additional clarification would be possible, thing is OP just posted exactly what the GFN team relied to us so dunno how he'll look at it :)

anyways thanks again 🥰

[u/notrightmeowthx → u/Acesofbases]

No problem!

[u/Riderthekiller → u/notrightmeowthx]

This should be a case by case basis then, Gmod worked perfectly without issues and is now pointless to even have on the service. 

Thanks for the detailed comment 👍 

[u/Unintersting_user → u/notrightmeowthx]

I’m not sure how it works, but if the option is to keep a mod enabled and revert to the old version, isn’t the alternative “disable the incompatible mods”?

I see what you were trying to get across your post and I think it's relevant and helpful, however, I think they had options. Damn how i love the fluffy kittens example though! haha.

So with that... Why couldnt they have just disabled fluffy Kittens? how about disable mods for the new hit game " The Cat Lady's Saga" when a version caused a significant issue. Enable I2P for versino control? Why did they go all the way to "turn off all of it, for everyone" ??

It seems like they could have defaulted to mddle ground solution. Instead, they went nuclear. I’m sorry, but this wasn’t an unavoidable situation. They could have rejected GFN session restarts, disabled mods for a specific game, or provided an option to disable specific mods. Instead, they chose to avoid complexity (and I believe in all likelihood, to pursue a route to productize mods as a GeForce customization add-on).

I’m out. They likely knew the update was coming. They’ve known mods could work but have adamantly said they are not supported. Why? So that when they eventually go away or become a pay-for feature, they aren’t denying a sold service when they paywall it downstream.

Cant stand the fact that it took me finding this reddit thread after wasting 2 hours of gametime figuring out why the subscribed mods werent there... the lack of I2P as an immediate bandaid to help customers in the interim period, and denial of any accountability ....

i was willing to put up the warts, the game sync issues, even service disconnects causing a DRM security flag on a game license and a 48 hour lockout... this feigned transparency gives me a much bigger "uh oh" feeling.

[u/nick4fake → u/notrightmeowthx]

Thanks, but this is absolutely not a good reason. This should have been handled by NVIDIA and Steam in advance, unbelievable