© 2025
A short opinion piece on the Steam Workshop.
In August 2023, the Youtuber Ratlobber made a video mentioning the_pit (I couldn't find the video, is it lost media?), a lost Garry's Mod map. This was the first time I was introduced to gmod lost media, which as ridiculous of a phrase as it is, is a surprisingly common thing. After some days, the map creator was found, and the original map itself was made public again. This got me thinking if other mods could be preserved so this wouldn't happen.
Over the years, some mods I've used got deleted off of the Workshop and it's disappointed me everytime, in particular: a playermodel of Mari Illustrious Makinami, a playermodel of Tsumugi Shirogane (later reuploaded), and a radio tower prop.
In April 2024, Nintendo began sending DMCA takedowns to various iconic Garry's Mod addons, because Nintendo. I'm not sure how many addons were lost or preserved during this, but this was when I began to realize the general unreliability of the Steam Workshop, and that people should probably be making copies of their favorite mods more. It pretty much showed that even the most iconic addons weren't immune to being deleted.
does anyone have people playground
— calm evening (@RealGOSC) December 6, 2025
the battler mod got removed I'm trying to look for it pic.twitter.com/FhgQoevRsx
On December 6, I opened up People Playground so I can kick back and relax. I was looking for the NPC of Battler Ushiromiya that I had only to find out it was missing. I checked my Steam Workshop and found out that the upload might have been deleted. I needed to throw battler into a lava pit man : (
I spent a couple of hours recreating the Battler NPC and also began to more seriously consider actually saving my favorite Workshop mods at that point.
Steam Workshop mods should be preserved. They're works of art (sarcasm). But seriously, to me this is like Geocities all over again. This is a potential burning of the Library of Alexandria if anything happened to Valve or the Workshop. I haven't looked into a proper way to preserve them yet, but I highly recommend to make a copy of your favorite Workshop mod.
Now writing this blog entry, I'm also reminded of times where mod authors (from other games) would delete everything for petty reasons, preservation could be useful in those cases.
© 2025