You say call companies like EA,Blizzard,Rockstar, yet your view on modders is just as shady to me.
Modders make things free? Yes, because most games do not allow you to sell your mods(trademark and all that), and if you do they will typically cease and desist you. besides, people who use mods, many of them are against paying for the mods, yet they bought your game because of the modding support including the game itself.
Modders are teams? the absolute majority of modders are solo.
Modders make mods you don't like? not your business, if someone starts yelling about it, then you state say that you do not support said mods. it really isn't your business, unless they are ‘selling’ the mod for use in your game, which could be cease and desisted.
as the owner of your game, there is nothing wrong with you being inspired by mods to improve the content of your own game. a modder implemented a library that extends modding options considerably or made them alot easier? you can do it better, or rather you should be able to do it better as you have better access to the core.
if you release the game with no modding, there is nothing preventing people from stealing your ideas to begin with, “oh, this game is a good idea, it should have modding”..it won't take that long to copy/reverse all the mechanics in your game and do so.
you are one person, not a team of multiple different talented programmers, that means a single person can copy your mechanics typically very quickly, and if they are very experienced from before they can surpass your work, and they might do so alot quicker than you ever could. and even if they aren't clever enough to make it from scratch, they can infact reverse engineer your game and track what your code is doing regardless of code obfuscation. it just takes more time.
assets? why would they care about ‘your’ assets when they get a crapton of similar assets ‘legally’ for free anywhere else or even pay a small chumpchange sum for it?
obfuscation and encryption..not a good idea.. a single person developed game spending lots of time and performance, time, that could be better spent elsewhere.
I have to say, OP is exactly the reason I'm now getting into making my own games. If all you want is to take as much money from people as possible, well, there are words for that sort of behavior. You make money by making games that people WANT to play. I guarantee, if you keep the attitude that players are just cash cows for you to milk you will never be successful at this.
As for mods hurting profits, that's absurd. I have more hours in Sims 4 than any of the other 80+ games in my Steam library. I have over 80 GB of custom content made by modders, more than 20,000 pieces. Yet I still own almost every DLC they have released. I've spent somewhere around $1,000 on that game over the years. And the only reason I play it so much is because of the mods. If I had to play it without mods, with all the stupid mechanics of the base game, I would have refunded it.
Civilization is another good cautionary example. Sid Meier is one of the pioneers of the DLC model. Civilization is renowned for releasing what is, effectively, a partial game and then doling out additional content over the next year or two. I don't buy Civ DLC because it isn't of any value to me. And I'm not certain I'll buy Civ VII when it is released because V and VI were both extremely disappointing to me. In other words, Sid is not getting my money because he isn't providing me anything of value. I don't use mods for Civ, but I still don't buy their stuff. Banning mods will not increase your profits.
The ops attitude is deeply flawed.
Mods ALWAYS increase longevity and profits of the base game., period.
Find me a game that this is not the case?
The OP is setting up an oppositional framework between him the developer and the player, the consumer.
if you have the ability to do so, the answer is always yes.
@gamelordofdeath
I think it depends on what your game's community might be asking for.
Are there many people asking for cosmetics/texture modding? Or do people want more power to fundamentally change game-play to how they want?
IIRC Arma 3, are still making huge sales as old as they are, and their modding capabilities pretty much allow for almost anything…basically anything you can think of, you can do it if you can figure out how to script it.
(( https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/somehow-the-11-year-old-niche-mil-sim-arma-3-managed-to-sell-nearly-700000-copies-during-the-steam-summer-sale/ ))
