Quote from: RagingDragon on Jul 29, 2015, 12:32:36 AM
I'll never understand why a publisher or developer would rather have a game totally die than release dev kits or source for it and let the modders go to town. It makes zero sense.
I can think of a couple good reasons. First, the tools have to be budgeted in to the game's design. They have to be configured in such a way people can use them - some inhouse tools are unfit to release because artists have to be familair with them at the code level. That's not true for all games of course but some tools are just a nightmare to work with - even for the people designing the game. I've messed around with some tools that were 'professional' in the sense that they got the job done, but you wouldn't want the public to use them. It costs a lot to make the tools useable by people outside of a dev team. The interface has to work, it has to do what it says on the box and it's got to have documentation that might be scattered across a servers in a studio. There's plenty of functionality that might only have a specific task and it might not suit the developer/publisher to release such content. So, yes, the tools have to be made fit for public use, and that costs money.
Then on top of that, they have to be safe in public hands. This means that the tools have to be hack proof. A badly prepared set of tools will provide backdoors into vulnerable parts of the game and may end up being exploited as cheats. So at the very least, if any code is released as part of an SDK it's not used by hackers to ruin the experience of the game. Get thousands of hackers using your tools to ruin an online game and the game itself is history within 24 hours.
On top of that, some tools also add model import abilities, which is fine except some tools also allow assets to be unpacked before they can be used in modders projects. The problem here is models and textures may get used outside the intended use of the publisher. For example, Garry's mod uses all manner of content stripped from other games. Publishers and owners of such titles make no money out of Garry's mod content because it's provided by third parties.
So those are the reasons I perceive as being critical problems with releasing tools:
1). It costs money to make them appropriate for the public to use.
2). Publishers risk losing control over how the content that dev teams have created for their game is going to be used - or more importantly - abused.
Then, of course, it's just easier to lock modding out entirely and force players to buy the next iteration of their IP without worrying about lost sales due to fan made content keeping an older title alive.
-Windebieste.
