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'

pcgamer.com:

Bad news for everyone who ever turned Mr X into Thomas the Tank Engine: Capcom's got its eye on you. In a recent video on the studio's Capcom R&D YouTube channel focused on «Anti-cheat and anti-piracy measures in PC games,» the Resident Evil and Street Fighter studio warned its own and other devs of the potential «Reputation damage caused by malicious mods» and said that—for the purposes of its engine's anti-cheat tech—«all mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported.»

The company never directly says anything about that nude Chun Li mod that scandalised young and old at the Corner2Corner Street Fighter 6 tournament a few months ago, but, well, you've gotta think that's lurking somewhere in the mind of the people that put this presentation together. 

In a section titled «Another problem: Mods,» Capcom's presenter remarks that mods are «another inseparable part of PC gaming,» but that «for the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats» because unsupported mods are «impossible to distinguish from cheat tools, implementation-wise.»

Up to this point, I have to admit I can see things from Capcom's point of view. I imagine it is difficult—if not impossible—to separate harmless mods and actual cheats in multiplayer games like SF6 without having a human being check each one on a case-by-case basis. It's clumsily worded, but the company seems to be saying mods aren't different from cheats on a technical level, rather than a moral one.

But then we get to the next slide, which is where the stuff about reputational damage comes in. «The majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game,» says the presenter, but warns that «some mods, however, can be detrimental to the