I think critics of my post are missing a crucial point: target audience. Who are they designing this for? If they're designing it for us then they will make their version but also be aware that a great deal of the community is going to want to create their own. This is why traditionally games have shipped with mission editors, map editors, and even the holy grail of modding the SDK. This however has happened less and less because of the success of console games and the advent of micro transactions. Mods are competition for this cash cow.
Its a cynical mindset that has nothing to do with the health of the community or the long term quality of the product. However, modding potential has given longer life to many games and has in and of itself spawned entire consumer bases based on those mods. I only purchased BF2 to play Project Reality. BF3 however cannot be modded to the same extent as BF2 as easily so the likelihood of anything like PR showing up there is very slim. This is fine for them cause they get their micro transactions from the mainstream community.
But this brings me back to the first point: target audience. Sim communities are pretty much the diametric opposite of mainstream communities. We are niche gamers. We play things that most people don't. Thats fine. They play Call of Duty, I play PR. They play World of Tanks or something, I play IL-2.
There are two audiences at play there, niche and mainstream. They are very different and as such call for very different design decisions. I'm fine with that. I don't need to shame (even though I enjoy it) the mainstream gamer to be able to enjoy my niche game... that is until they start killing all the nice games in favor of trying to turn them into maintream online cash cows.
The simple fact is that they abused and tormented the Silent Hunter community progressively overtime, putting unrealistic pressures on the developers of the games and then basically seeing us as more trouble than we're worth because we won't tolorate a broken game with unsatisfying features that a mainstream audience more readily digests. To be sure broken doesn't work for anyone, but I believe that the progressively worse quality of the Silent Hunter series as it went form 3 through 4 through 5 was a result of them placing mainstream expectations on a niche game. They wanted fast turn over, short development, and quick bucks. Niche games don't work like that and the most successful ones usually have positive relationships between developer and community. This is most easily noticed in how Bohemia, the Arma Infantry Sim developer, interacts with its community. They basically build their game under the assumption that the community will mod it to their liking. They know who their target audience is. They also don't have to answer to a big publisher who doesn't care about the consumer, but just wants to crunch numbers til their bell curves come out with maximum profits for minimum investment looking golden.
But this kind of relationship isn't unprecedented in the history of mainstream gaming. Many major mods for mainstream games have lead to strong relationships with the original developer. A perfect example of this is the Forgotten Hope mod for Battlefield 2. Many of the developers of this mod have been hired by DICE (the original developer of BF2) and have done things like develop mod tools for them, etc. And lets not forget the meteoric rise of Valve. Even Team Fortress 2, one of the greatest and most well balanced online FPS games, was originally a mod for Quake that became a mod for HL1 that became a retail product in the Source engine from Half-Life2.
Remember Half-Life? That game was a real gem for modders and as a result some incredible titles spawned from it. One of the most popular and successful online FPSs was originally a community mod: Counterstrike. Day of Defeat Classic was a winner for a 2001 mod competition which became another title sold by Valve which was then updated, just like TF2, into Day of Defeat Source.
Modding may not directly influence specific decisions in design very often these days but there's no denying that they've had a huge impact on the growth of gaming over the last decade+, but that doesn't mean that mods and developer don't have a potential relationship outside of the Valve model either. The entire thing is about potential. Developers used to always release some kind of tool set for modders. They saw it as an investment in their project. Now however Publishers are preferring short life spans for their games so that they can maximize the profit from new releases or microtransactions over time from online games. Just look at Call of Duty. They're releasing one practically every year but the changes are incredibly minor. MW3 apparently has statics in a few maps from MW1 in it for heaven's sake!
So, what am I really saying? That modders have always been a big part of the history of gaming and only recently have publishers been trying to suffocate us out of existence as micro transactions have risen to prominence in the post Xbox world and as piracy has lead many publishers to rely on online games to protect against this.
But one thing I have to disagree with is the assertion that the consumer has no impact on the design process. Every product under the sun has some kind of consumer test group. You make a new cereal you get a bunch of kids together and see if they actually like what it tastes like.
So what does that mean for us here? It means that if the new SH Online game doesn't taste good to us, the old simmers, then they aren't trying to sell us stuff anymore. Fine, the game was less and less our cup of tea. But what have gamers always done when a game didn't meet their tastes? They modded it, but not anymore. Online precludes this, deliberately. They are trying to do an end run around our own preferences to force us to 'settle' for only whats available.
So why do I get so upset about this? Because I've always lived in my niche, letting the mainstream live in theirs. But now more and more they're chasing the niche out of gaming in favor of courting the mainstream and even trying to force reluctant buyers to have to buy into the microtrans system even if they normally wouldn't fork it over. I mean, how can you NOT buy that map pack that got released day 1 if everyone else is? Basically you're not just buying a $50 game on release day, you're also buying a $10 map pack, and probably a few more, and by the time they're done with you you're paying the better part of $100 for a game that you may or may not love to death but when you get tired of the content you have you can't even go and make your own map because they don't wnat you to anymore AND on top of it all you have to buy one of THEIR dedicated servers because they don't release server code anymore! (See: BF3).
I don't begrudge the mainstream their piece of the pie, hell they can take 99% of the pie, so why do these publishers keep trying to turn that little minority into the rest of the mainstream? Its infuriating.
OH! And one more thing if you're still reading. All those games listed as being great out of the box without any community involvement, well... how old are most of them? When was the last time a game was shipped and didn't beg for a mod or a patch or something to make it even half as good as those great games that came ready to rock and roll a decade ago?
Gaming is changing and its not for the better as far as us niche players are concerned. I don't see why thats a silly point of view.
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