Sjorpha, on 22 February 2020 - 05:15 PM, said:
Yeah, it's all some ingenious master plan. Release a garbage game to provoke more modding...
Or maybe they just aren't good at making games? Or they don't care if the game is good? One of those seem more likely IMO.
Haven't been around video games long, have you? Proven fact: Video games that cater to modding have a longer shelf life than games that do not... the biggest proof of this is probably the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise, which despite the core code being almost 15 years old now, is STILL selling copies. Also look at games such as the ArmA series, Half Life and Half Life 2, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Falcon 4.0, and we could go on and on. For single player games, especially, modding extends the playability of the game to well beyond a publisher's development cycle and drastically increases the replayability value to the customer. It also allows for customers to develop content that the developer may not be legally able to include (ie with the aforementioned games, the lack of expensive licensing agreements with real world manufacturers).
For a competitive online multiplayer environment, modding is not desirable, nor should it be, as the players should be forced to stay with the game as the developer intended it, but for a single player, or co-op game, the ability to customize the experience is one that a huge number of customers look for. And fact of the matter is, the player base is FAR more expansive and because of that in most cases can be more creative than any development team ever assembled. No game developer has ever had thousands of employees working on a single product, but that is what you get when modders take hold of the product: Thousands of people working to improve the product in a multitude of ways that is just not possible from any developer in the world.
Now, if you think you can do better, by all means, do a Bill Gates, pony up the cash, and start your own development studio, and let's see what you can do. But before you embarrass yourself, go check out many indie developer pages and read carefully the challenges that they all faced getting started and getting their products out the door, and the dozens upon dozens of setbacks and failures. Pavel at SCS Software is pretty forthcoming with the challenges he has faced, as is Raphael over at Hinterland Games.
Most game developers that produce products that are designed to be modded are actually only supplying a platform, with very limited assets, which makes the product less expensive to produce, and they can concentrate on maintaining functionality and quality control over the core platform rather than trying to do that as well as release new content that will meet customers' ever growing expectations. By going this route, I suspect that in the future, we will see some DLC releases and feature upgrades available, but mostly what we will see is engine upgrades and streamlining.
In a nutshell, there is nothing wrong with publishing a game with modding support built into it, provided the developer makes it perfectly clear that there is absolutely no technical support for a modded game, and that the developer emphasizes that modders are responsible for maintaining their own content and the developer is not under any obligation to ensure that mods continue to maintain any compatability. And every developer that has opened mod support has been amazed at what users provide in the way of fresh, additional content.
As John Lydgate paraphrased Abraham Lincoln so well, "You can please some of the people all the time, or you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all the time."