Are Mods good for PC gamings bottom line?

I like games you can mod. Games out of the box are made how someone else likes them, or to please most of the people most of the time. Most devs will agree that games are released unready - no game is completely finished or bug free, they are just done to a timescale and degree of readyness.

I fine tune games to suit me. Plus it keeps my interest in a game long after the honeymoon is over. It can also become a hobby in itself.

Mods prolong the life of games... sure that if soase was without mods, i have certainly move away long time ago and buy some other games... space strategy game from a other publisher... well, pretty sure that i will have switch to a other game before entrenchment, diplomacy, rebellion was/will be released...

Mods are bad for other game from other publisher but they are good for the publisher of the game who can be modded...

Mods can be bad in the case of sequel who reduce the modding possibility... for example, supcom II who don't allow easy custom map... or Dragon Age II... in both case, a lot of people continue to use the previous release who allow modding...

In the case of soase, i am pretty sure that more of 5% of the customer are using mod... almost all major sci-fi show have a mod on soase ( babylon 5, star war, star trek, stargate, Halo, etc )...

In some case, mods can create new sales... for example, the is a mod called "Dawn of Victory" not yet released...

It is a total conversion mod and people are working on it for years... high quality mods like these can hit numerous computer/game magazine once released... and lead to a new increase in the sale rate of soase ( total conversion need the original game )...

At the money level, what is more interesting :

- make a game, sell 50000 copy... make a new game, sell 50000 copy... make a new game, etc... each "make" stage ask a lot of time and money for the devs...

- make a game, allow modding... each mod allow a few more sale and prolong the life of the game... at the end, over 2000000 million copy of sins sell with a original dev budget around 1.000.000$ ... as for modders, well, they work for free!!!

In some case, feedback and/or mods can be useful for the devs too and spare them some work... by example, a chunk of the TSOP mod was include in one of the official diplomacy patch... as today, the diplomacy.exe have become the more computer resource efficient version...

Mods ARE gaming life.  The more they can be modded, the better!  Darn and modding is a consuming hobby--but cheaper than vintage car collecting.

But it actually would be really cool to hear what the developers think of modding.  Nice question.

In the case of Soase, don't need to know what they think... only action count... at numerous time, patch have add features or increase limit on the request of modders...

But one devs team is not a other... and i am not sure that it is devs who decide if a game will have modding capabilities or not... in some way, devs are like worker in a factory, they make what the direction ask them to make...

10 years ago most developers would frown on mods... That was until the Quake 3 community started releasing a ton of GOOD mods, and then the Homeworld community started releasing GOOD mods from a game that was supposedly "un-moddable".SoA 1 pushed the engine well above and beyond its original limitations. Homeworld would have been dead in a year without mods.

Many games died because they couldnt be modded at all, or could be modded, but not modded well. Example: Nexus the Jupiter Incident. Yes you can mod it, but the Hard Coded AI of that game is so horrendous that it wasnt worth the effort. Hence dead game.

Since then it has been a mixed bag. Games like the battlefield 1942 wouldnt have stood a chance without mods. Then the developers of the Desert Combat mod went professional, and helped to create battlefield 2.

Starfleet Command modders went on to help create ST: Legacy (specifically Rick Knox aka P81).

In the case of SotSE i think it is pretty safe to say that the developers approve of modding the game, and took steps to make it so. Yes some of TSOP did make it officially into the game. SoA 2 is still going strong, and there are MANY other good mods for Sins.

Game developers would be foolish NOT to let, or help their games be modded now. Relic learned this lesson with Dawn of War, and Dawn of War 2 (unfortunetly NOT with Space Marine). As did Bioware with NWN, KotoR, and Mass Effect.

Most IP's have a permission, and non profit policy. As long as credit is given where its due, Appropriate disclaimers are posted, and no profit is made off of the IP then it is fair usage. Some IP even encourage the modder (Example EVE Online).

Mods do help boost sales of games. Mods can turn a boring crap game into gold. Mods help introduce, and train the next generation of game developers. So to answer the OP's question. YES, Mods do help a games bottom line.. Period.

Homeworld was excellent in its own right, and has got to be one of my most favorite games of all time. Homeworld 2 couldn't even compete with it in my opinion.

There are games that I would only play modded.  Oblivion for example.

The bottom line is mods are good for PC gaming as a whole, as it encourages the purchase of games that are moddable/have been modded well. To use myself as an example, if Sins wasn't moddable, I would not be playing the game now, let alone own it, as there would be little of interest for me.

I still believe that the percentage of gamers that buy a game only cause of its mod potential is very small.

I understand all the benefits guys....its just when you play for free your not buying new......

The degree to which a game is modded is a direct  indication of how exciting a released game concept is to the players.

When modding is opened up by design it effectively creates a distributed programming model that can do more than the original design.

I call that good.

Having made games though, I do wonder how much "That's my baby they're operating on!" angst happens with the designers when they see large scale modding of their games.

While true that the percentage is small, it's because mod capability sucks on the whole.  If you tell Bethesda that the percentage is small for TES, you might kill them with the ensuing laughter.  Either that or they're self deluded, entirely possible since their new combat system is still inferior to previous mods...

Oblivion is a godawful example of an RPG compared to Oblivion modded.  It sold far better than superior contemporaries, and the download counts on Nexus indicate why.  OBMM has been downloaded nearly 2 million times.  I myself got it out of curiosity to see just how deluded it's fans were(lots), not an interest in the mods, but I bought the expansions purely for mod compatibility.  Assuming I bother to get Skyrim, it will be because I like the look of the mod community.  I can't imagine the main campaign this time around is less obscenely boring than the one for Oblivion was, and exploring 500 similar dungeons doesn't make up for a story that bores when the combat system sucks. :)  I'd take Dark Messiah any day without a very healthy modding community.

I expect the modding community only sold a couple thousand copies of Sins explicitly, but it was advertised in advance.  There are tens of thousands of people that have played the mods, how many close sales were tipped by mod access?  For something like Oblivion though, with the rich modding history of Morrowind before it, a few hundred thousand is more likely.

To reverse this on it's head, what if instead modders all of the sudden began to charge for their mods, either by paying the original developer a fee or a portion of all sales, and these mods sell? Would one then be supporting new or indie developers, or not supporting anyone at all?

There's a flaw in your argument; you are assuming modders aren't developers/coders/whatever of any kind. They are, and how are they paid? By support from the community, whether it be an e-peen made of download counts, feedback, or other things.

I believe (correct me if i am wrong) that the Half Life modding community created Team Fortress, and Counterstrike. Now those 2 "Mods" are being sold as full blown games. Those are examples of a developer taking advantage of the modding community, and making profit. Team Fortress, and Counterstrike use Half Life IP, and code with Valves approval. Which evolved into the "Source" Variants after HL2 was released. Mods based on the games original IP can, and have been turned into expansions that you pay for.

However Intellectual Property Like Star Trek, B5, Stargate etc. can, and WILL shut you down if you try to make so much as a PENNY off of their IP. I have already seen it happen in the Starfleet Command modding community when some IDIOT tried to sell his trek models on those very Mod forums (Turns out the idiot didnt even build those models, but that is another story altogether). The Legal Documents are too much wall of text to post here, but long story short is Paramount, and Amarillo Designs both handed out cease, and desist letters to damn near EVERYONE in the mod community (myself included), Threats to have individuals arrested, and sued, A major flame war ensued, and it damn near destroyed the Starfleet Command/Bridge Commander modding community. Until clear and precise documentation was posted on how we could use the Trek IP.

I dont make mods for E-Peen, or praise. I do it as a hobby, because it is what i enjoy doing. If i couldn't post them i would still do it anyway. If modding were a full time job i wouldnt enjoy it near as much as i do now. Plastic has been replaced by Pixels

Kudos for this sir.