Update 9:24 AM EST 4/7/2021: Community manager "PDX_Pariah" posted on the "Legalize Gay Modding" thread, apologizing for both the delayed response due to Easter weekend in Sweden and reiterated their dedication to providing more in-game options for same-sex relationships. Same-sex concubines should be moddable before 1.4 while moddable same-sex marriages should be a feature in 1.4 proper. As for Waffle Ironer's patch, they state that Paradox's Terms of Service has strict rules against mods that directly modifies ck3.exe, primarily due to the fact that they can't be verified for security reasons. "This has absolutely nothing to do with how any of us at Paradox feel about what a modder may have created or whether we agree with their intentions," Pariah concludes. "No exe mods, period."
The original story follows below:
As modders for the simulation/role-playing game Crusader Kings III may know, modding in same-sex relationships is a difficult affair. One modder managed to figure out how to do it by reverse-engineering some code, but has earned a ban from the Paradox forums for his trouble.
Why is this Crusader Kings III modder in trouble?
On Medium, a user by the name of 'Waffle Ironer' posted an article about their experience modding in same-sex marriages into Crusader Kings III. One of the main problems with modding it in was that the game's binary is coded to not allow same-sex marriages. Inspired by someone who managed to greatly cut the loading times on GTA Online, Waffle Ironer did some light reverse-engineering of the code to make a 390-byte unofficial game patch to bypass the hard-coded roadblock and posted it on Paradox's official forums.
For their troubles, they received a ban from the Paradox forums, the removal of the patch thread, and any posts that even mentioned the patch from when it was live were removed. The rest of the article is dedicated to teaching readers how to reverse-engineer the game to get same-sex marriages, and a plea to not harass Paradox employees over how this was handled. "The ones I've chatted with seem like nice people," they conclude.
How have Paradox and Waffle Ironer responded to this?
Aside from the mentioned bans, there haven't been any official word from Paradox about the ban. We have contacted them about this issue and will update if we hear anything back. As for Waffle Ironer, who is a major proponent for gay mods for Crusader Kings III on the Paradox forums, we haven't been able to contact them. Neither their Medium account or their suspended Paradox forums account had any sort of contact information. We'll update this article if either party contact us.
Crusader Kings III is currently available on Steam.
