I appreciate your kind words but my skills as a "modder" are greatly exaggerated. "Text editor and avid user of Wikipedia" pretty much sums up most of goes into my mod. As far as trade and compensation from the devs / publisher while on the surface it sounds like a good idea it would likely open up so many cans of worms for them its not something I'd expect anybody to entertain.
That being said though, I'd like to think that this sort of thing serves itself, I put something together that I can have fun playing with and maybe spark a few ideas. Not going to be so bold as to claim that people are buying the game because of the work I've done, but you have to wonder how many sales happened because people saw Captain Jive Turkey flying around the Norwegian Sea in an Alfa the other day. Again this sort of thing serves itself here because each new purchase brings the game that much closer to DLC viability and continued development.
I'm loath to speak for them but if I had to guess I'd say that Cold Waters has probably had a meteoric rise and smashed sales projections and the like, but again no small part of that is the devs having foresight to make the game very modder friendly to grow this community around it.
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