Interview with Garry on Shacknews

So did you try out to install a game like Battlefield 1942 from release CD? Searching hours for patches and then another hour for a working mirror is not what I think is amusing. Same goes for the most mods.

Imagine you downloaded "that little code-mod" back in the day but you never played it again so it stays v0.1 and someday you just want to give it another try. now go, find the modpage, fiddle through hundreds of frontpage templates before you find out the current version info, find out what patch you need (b1, b2, b2a, b1.2, b3...) and then get a mirror which will not make you suffer the 1kB/s death.

If Steam would allow a SVN-Like distributor embedded in its gui and if they want to save Bandwith mix the server-side dist with an additional peer2peer exchanger even the smallest mod would stand a chance.

Sure it was a bit dodgy then, but we're not in 2001 anymore. Patches these days generally don't have to be installed in a certain order and all that rubbish; most of the time you can just download one big one that overwrites anything before (keeping configurations, obviously).

I'm not really sure how using an example like Battlefield 1942 is really relevant. Even its successor, Battlefield 2142, has a handy news ticker at the bottom of all pages on the menu which notifies players of new patches. And the patch overwrites any previous ones, including the game as freshly installed from its DVD.

As long as players are properly notified of new patches and the developers have produced the patches properly so you don't need to go 1039 -> 1040 -> 1069 -> 1080 -> 2010 -> 2060 -> etc, it's no real issue.

Of course, I do find it bewildering when games don't take advantage of the ability to notify players on the menu of new patches. Tribes 2 cracked this one years ago by simply doing a check of Sierra's web servers when the game's started.

As far as I'm aware Source mods already have the ability to display web content in the GUI, so it shouldn't be that much of an issue to implement.

Patching is just one of many reasons people may not play mods, its certainly a hassle even for fans.

A Steam patch system for mods would be a god send