How many websites do you know of where you can download mods for Assetto Corsa? I cannot even count them on my fingers anymore. There are a bunch of websites where modders can upload them. There are a bunch of websites where the website owners just take them and reupload them. And then there are the modders who upload their mods on their own on Patreon, their own blog or some forum. It’s a mess. Where are all the mods coming from?
A Tale of Attribution
Over the past few days, I have sought out mods for Assetto Corsa in my bid to collect them all. What I have found is plenty of content of questionable origin.
Now there are two sides to this coin.
“Mods broaden the content. Their origin is not as important as the fact that players get more options.”
vs
“All work should be credited. Players should be able to know who worked on a mod and be able to find out where it’s from.”
Both sides have their point, however the more anarchistic view of it being a free-for-all seems a bit unfair.
Well, that might be because quite a lot of mod content is ripped from other games. Perfectly reasonably when you subscribe to the theory that every person should have access to everything. However, it’s theft and therefore illegal.
Will Assetto Corsa EVO Address This?
Assetto Corsa EVO, which is scheduled to release into early access on January 16th, 2025, will most likely not include modding tools at first release. However, it’s pretty clear that EVO is supposed to be the next stage for the original game, which came out in 2014. And let’s be real, what would Assetto Corsa be without mods?
Assetto Corsa EVO could address this topic. However, who knows how it would be implemented. After all, they did mention that official mod support itself is still up on the table.
What We Know
Talking to traxion.gg, Marco Massarutto, CEO of Kunos mentioned “Possibly we may create a light editor like we did for the original Assetto Corsa so that people can contribute to content creation. Modding is definitely one of the open topics on the table, but no decision has been made yet. At the moment, we are focused on creating the [EVO] game itself.”
He went on to say “What we want to prevent this time is abuses in how some Assetto Corsa modding is being used, because we don’t like to see stolen content from different sims. The vision behind modding is that it should let people express their talent and create their own content. When someone grabs content from another game using third-party tools and they just put in the game or they sell it on third-party websites, it’s far against the vision we have for it. We believe that it also gives a bad perception of those people who spend a lot of time creating original content. This time, we want to see how we can support the good modders in a way that can create a synergy between the studio and the most talented creators.”
So, Massaruto directly acknowledged this problem and that they want to prevent it.
I’ll be looking forward to any way Kunos may find to address this issue. Beit through an official mod database (maybe through Steam Workshop, like rFactor 2) or other means.
We Can Only Wait And See…
For now, let’s wait for Assetto Corsa EVO to come out.
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