After a naked Chun Li scandalised a fighting game tournament, Capcom sounds the alarm about PC game modding: 'There are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals'

They're not wrong but the real reason publishers are against modding is because

It extends the lifetime of a game and the existence of "overhaul" or enhancement mods especially goes against their interest in selling sequels and remasters.
If everyone was comfortable with modding it would be pretty hard to sell cosmetic items the same way they do now.

Pretty much, there are instances where remasters are completely pointless because you can just mod the original to be of superior quality
It is a reason why we will not see the GameCube versions of Resident Evil 2 and 3 ever remastered, even though I would want a way to buy these legally
- GC versions of RE2/3 were just ports, weren’t they? The only original RE games on GameCube were. REMake, RE0, and RE4.
- The Legendary edition of the Mass Effect Trilogy was a lot worse that the modded original games.
  They never fixed the FOV issues or even made it work on Ultrawide monitors. Same bugs, less texture fidelity, and no more ass shots. The remaster was a joke.

I choose to believe that this is the first time some Capcom executive became aware of rule34 content, and organized a series of awkward high level meetings about it where the rest of the staff all had to pretend like they haven't known about the existence of lewd fan content from age 13 on.

It's a pretty amusing head cannon.

Meanwhile, we’re all reading your comment pretending people only start to look at lewd stuff at age 13…

The only thing offensive to public order and morals is prudish bullshit religious ideology.

Nothing about the naked human form is immoral.

Sir, I will make you aware of your error. Children (innocent!) may be exposed to the naked breast from birth to age 1.5, and then again from age 18 until death. Any exposure to the unaugmented protuberances of the female form during which the victim has witnessed the earth revolve around the sun more than twice but fewer than one score times has been scientifically proven to corrupt the youth and chasten the modest!
- You heathen! You would allow little innocent children to see boobies! This is an outrage!
It's like one of the most beautiful things in existence.
Female characters are heavily sexualised and objectified though. And what media does it is not helping with the issue happening in real life as well.
It's immoral because Chun Li didn't consent.
- Lol. Cartoon characters giving consent.
Sure, but there's a time and a place where nudity is appropriate, which I think is the point they're trying to make.
- Sort of. They present a straw man about tournaments and other public events, and while that's a fair point, those can (and probably already do) have rules about it.
  You should always have the option to use a mod in your home. If companies don't want to support running a game with mods, that should be the first thing support asks.
- There is nothing inherently wrong with nudity and sexuality.
  It only makes you uncomfortable because of the way you were raised. But it’s difficult for you to see that you are looking at this with those set of values.

I mean it's not surprising that Capcom is complaining about people modding nude characters into their games, but this still reads like some Capcom executive just learned what mods were and what they could do.

But also hasn't seen them personally in action because otherwise he'd be too busy to say anything.
His mind is going to blow when he learns of Rule 34.

So how to install the mod?

This reminds me of when Tommy Itagaki threw a fit over nude mods for Dead or Alive. "These characters are like my children!" If that's how you treat your children, someone ought to call CPS.

Christ. Dude was surprised the game with a jiggle physics slider for tit bouncing got nude mods?
- The first Tomb Raider had a woman made out of a few basic polygons resulting in triangular breasts and of course, someone made a nude mod for it.
  People refer to "Rule 34" on the Internet for a reason.
Right? If it were something like Last Of Us I'd get it, but fighting games generally have characters designed to titillate. The ladies are mostly cheesecake pin-ups but with bigger muscles. Getting cranky about nude mods in those is hilariously hypocritical.
The fact Itagaki compares nude mod to children is extremely concerning. An investigator needs to make sure children are safe around the guy.

I have no problem with mods, including mods that introduce adult content.

However, I can certainly understand not wanting nude characters showing up at a public tournament that doesn't want them there. The tournament organizers are trying to provide an experience for the players and viewers, and it's entirely-legitimate for them to want to control that. I mean, if you're having, say, a poker tournament, it's entirely within reason for the organizers to say that they don't want the players, say, stripping down in the middle of the tournament. Hell, or they could want an only nude tournament. Their experience, they're crafting it.

However...I don't really understand the circumstances that led to mods being a unique problem here, and the article doesn't say.

One possibility is that the tournament organizers wanted to have nude characters involved and it's just Capcom taking issue with having their product involved. I assume that that's not the case here.

Another is that a player broke expectations or tournament rules by doing so. If that's the case, okay, but I don't see as how mods are some special or unique concern. Any tournament in sports or whatever is going to have the possibility that competitors act inappropriately relative to what the tournament wants to permit. Could be tennis players doing Hitler salutes or billiards players mooning the audience or StarCraft players using profanity in text chat. And in general, I think that the approach used there to mitigate the thing is pretty similar. You have a referee or judge who disqualifies a player, and they forfeit. The local audience is gonna see, but whatever, the same players could do so in a crowd anywhere, tournament or no. If you're streaming to a remote audience, then you have a delay of a certain amount of time on the stream, and you give the hosts a button to cut the audio and video feed, and if you have the crew to handle it near-live, maybe do things like bleep out or black out whatever you want to censor and keep the feed going. I don't see how mods are anything special here.

They're crying wolf to try and justify putting shit in the game to prevent modding (so they can sell more skins) is my personal theory.
- People active in online game communities are already an outlier, never mind the fraction of a fraction of those people actually modding them. It doesn't seem worth the bad PR.
Why on earth would a fighting tournament allow mods? Nevermind cosmetics... it's just a easy gateway to cheating. Nobody knows what kind of code those mods are executing. Maybe it's a simple cosmetic mod that has a hidden option to make some move a few frames faster.
The problem isn't the mods, but the tournament organizers allowing it in a competitive setting, without any filtration.
- If you mess with frame data you get desync and it's very easy to tell when that happens. Messing with anything other than models/textures will desync the game unless you're talking about offline. But even then pretty much every mod you download is made to be used online so people would notice by the time it makes it to an offline
Yeah, this is a strange situation. As far as I'm aware, skins would only be player-side so this shouldn't be something like accidently showing a nude character, this would be some person bringing their own modded game and bystanders seeing it? Was this someone's setup they forgot to un-mod or some dude who lost and set up some games on his own hardware?
- One of the tournament presenters, who was broadcasting the match that was being spectated through his PC, forgot to disable the nude mod.
  This article goes further into the original incident.

'There are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals'

I'm always surprised when I see articles like this sporadically come up.

These days you can mold games into whatever you want them to be with mods. It's a deliberate action by the consumer and fits right in with rule 34 content.

There's also a lot of bigger targets out there for adult content like Skyrim and the Sims.

Why surprised? Capcom needs to say something because their game was involved, but they don't have anything really to say, so they article fluffs it up a bit.
It baits rage, gets clicks, and ultimately is inconsequential.
- I don't think they really need to say anything is my point. It would be like Mojang commenting about gun mods for Minecraft

Oh jeeze.