See the game Trials Fusion for an example of this, I think it worked well for them profits wise?
Enthusiasts are a pretty small segment of any customer base.
You're discounting the value of good design and creator experience.
There might be a decreasing barrier to entry for creating more content for a game, but that doesn't mean everything will be of the same quality.
You sell them your brand and the quality behind that brand. This is arguably what is being sold for any product.
For games in particular, it's also not a new concept. Mods never really competed with expansions since the expansions promised a higher level of quality.
Today, you can look at games like Tabletop Simulator, Minecraft (to a degree), Mario Maker, or anything with Steam Workshop that also has DLC. The existence of usermade content is not really an obstacle for selling (well-made) DLC.
Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne was an amazing hit, partly because it opened up the editor even more for content like DOTA.
However you can think of it this way. The game shipped is a point in space. The possible mods to the game are nearby points in this gamespace. Given tools dictate the work involved to get to that new point in gamespace. The better the tools the larger that isosurface is for some given max amount of work. The problem for game studios is that the things they want to sell might exist within the space that is work path accessible to the mod community.
Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and getting all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.
Where most AAA game engines used to make modding easy but licensing to sell mods hard, there are now entire engines (Unity, Unreal) with fairly simple, linear (as opposed to exponential or worse) license systems that allow hobbyists to build with the same tools of AAA developers and license their work for resale, growing organically with their audience size rather than being constrained to artificial limits of steep license curves.
It's one of those cases where it's both better than its ever been and worse than it ever was, and you can write clickbait articles for both sides of that, but overall, unclouded by nostalgia glasses the answer is probably just that it's the same as it ever was.
Minecraft doesn't have any significant modding support from the developer. Official 'mods' are mostly limited to textures / shaders. The real modding tools that exist for Minecraft were created by the community and largely exist because Java is comparatively easy to reverse engineer in addition to some 'off the record' style support of the mod lib authors by the game developers. The whole mod scene has gone through various phases of questionable legality and unknown future. The Minecraft mod scene exists largely in spite of the game developer, not due to it.
Official mod support (with an installer and an API) was on the dev roadmap but never materialized.
I think the distribution networks and art assets still make it more effective than unity for testing game concepts. And that's what leads to games like Battle Royale and DOTA.
It's also safer. Running executables (with full access to your user account) from random people on the internet is the quickest way to get pwned. Games with built-in mod support often sandbox any code within the mod so that it doesn't have unrestricted access to your machine. (Any game with automatic mod downloading upon server join better be doing this at least.) So it's both easier and safer to try out games (er, mods/maps) on random people's suggestions. (Same goes for browser-based games, since browsers sandbox all code in web pages.)
starting with most accessible:
Modders<->Unity Devs<->Unreal Devs<->Custom C++ engine devs
Creating incentives for game developers to add mod tools to their games by creating the incentive for potential mod-makers to make some money off their work seems like a solid strategy for me. (I think I heard a rumor somewhere that Valve is going to bring back the "paid mods" idea again soon, possibly in a retooled form.)
Your other major problem is that much of the audience for mods are kids or teens who don't have a lot of money. Keeping modding free is what keeps content generation gated to those who intend to truly intend to better the community.
As an example, I now continually get fraud warnings on my Epic account, which I keep for UDK access, because Fortnite blew up. It's really annoying :(
A TC mod for a game gives you some distinct advantages, especially if distributed through the Steam Workshop:
1. One click installation - the Steam client takes care of everything for you.
2. Community forums and news feeds already set up - you can get instant feedback from players
3. Easier to get a foothold on someone's machine - it's easier to get someone to install your game knowing that it's a TC for a game they already have (so they may have some notion about the quality of the assets and engine) as opposed to trying to convince someone to install a completely new game.
The main thing that mods give developers is a distribution network and that is invaluable if you ask me. Getting someone to install your game is the biggest hurdle.
The industry has definitely changed, but I don't feel like there are less mods or less people interested in making mods than there used to be.
For that matter, some games that Paradox only publishes (e.g. Cities: Skylines) also have fantastic modding support, though that's hit-and-miss compared to the games they develop in house.
If you want to develop inside an existing environment, there are the virtual worlds - Minecraft, SineSpace, High Fidelity, Sansar, and Second Life. Even 3DXchat, which is supposed to be porno but has enough building tools that people are using it for other things. SineSpace is very developer friendly right now. Few users, but nice tools.
I strongly disagree with the point this article is trying to make, it feels like some kinds of proxy-gatekeeping (our games were so much better)
I'm mostly saying that AAA games not having modding is just a big loss, especially given how this generation of games (Fortnite, Overwatch, League) are magnitudes bigger than anything before it.
The Kids I interact with are on tablets/phones, not the PCs we had that we could modify and upgrade and tweak as we saw fit.
Currently I feel like we're in a period of very locked in devices that stifle creativity by default. Even PC games are always online so you can't get all the content of the game, it has to be server-side unlocked or bought.
ugh. I think the key point the author is missing that those are all online-only studio-server games. I can't remember any of those ever being properly moddable.
What Doom, Quake, and WarCraft3 had in common that you a) had a singleplayer mode and b) more importantly could host your own (dedicated or not) server - so you weren't taking part in a persistent MMO world where you'd for example ruin the economy with your "unlimited gold" mod, but you were setting the rules in your game mode.
The most popular games aren't cutting edge graphics games anyway. Gameplay is beating pretty graphics in lots of ways.
And those games that don't provide modding tools? They'll go quicker out the door and will be less famous.
Is this even a problem? Are there game developer shortages?
Discovering the world of custom mods was amazing. It was basically the equivalent of google playstore + having your own mini android tools to build your own maps. There were so many unique genres birthed from that game. Tower defense originated as a starcraft 1 mod, and many other things such as temple runs (based off zergling runs). DoTA was based on the works of Aeon of Strife, which was considered the first MoBA. If you were to look at many of the indie games produced today, chances are there was a starcraft1 or warcraft3 map variant of it. These were the maps that became the most popular, the top 10%. The rest that didn't make it into mainstream modes are essentially the 90% of game apps that failed in the google playstore
Modding felt like programming. It was very much an object oriented programming paradigm. Units had attributes associated with them, to which you could modify globally. Things like their overall HP, armor, damage rating, etc. You could set observables, e.g. events, in designated areas in the map. Like if player X came to position Y, event Z happened.
I learned a lot by compiling my own modded versions of popular apps. I would install cheats inside of them, things like additional resources and units if you do a sequence of events (e.g. move unit to a special location). There wasn't really any validation in checking map authenticity, its very much like forking a git repo and publishing your own npm package.
Users who came to your map would have to download the latest version. Some would get skeptical in seeing new changes, wondering what promoted the new patch. This wouldn't work so well in popular maps, b/c the map publisher put a changelog on their website. But less popular ones it was much easier to get away with.
My modded map with the cheat installed would later get redistributed in the P2P network. People would play it. Sometimes if I promoted it enough by hosting the lobby, it would be the only seed available. Much like how torrenting works. Especially if that version added new features that people enjoyed.
Sometimes maps created get lost forever. Since everything was P2P, if no one had that map installed on their machine, and no one hosted that map anymore or played it, it was dead. Much like lost porn. This happened several times in which I wanted to find a map I played previously, but reinstalled my computer and could not find anymore lobbies to download the map anymore. Examples include some Lord of the Rings maps, Battle of Troy, Helms Deep, or things like Nexus Arenas
These days things are much different. Mirrors for hosting mods, either official (e.g. steam) or 3rdparty websites are widely available. There wasn't any youtube tutorials for making maps, you just had to read the help documents, and breakdown / understand other maps. Much like you do looking at opensource repos on github.
Modmaking was rewarding in its own right. You used the exact same AAA tools developers used, and when something finally clicked, you could build even cooler maps. Sometimes, you could install mods into your editor. Things like adding text colors to your units is one of many examples. Its kind of like if you installed a plugin extension with visualstudio code.
I don't know how this compares anymore to kids learning how to make mods in Roblox, GTA5 mods, minecraft, etc. Its probably not as complicated as it used to be, since youtube has so many tutorials out there. The real challenge back then was figuring everything out on your own and/or finding a reputable map mentor to help you out. IRC was a whole another thing I was introduced to in starcraft1 / warcraft3 days. The beauty of this back then was that it was the first of its kind, this custom modmaking scene for RTS based games.
