alt Hacker News>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game.
eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description.
Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI would be negative a few million percentage points.
You seem to be taking examples where an individual player can tailor an experience to be just what they want, and extrapolating it back to presume the developers, who have to make a game for a wider audience, are stupid somehow.
Its a bad opinion, based on nothing and very much in the mode of the modern gamer.
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Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
Maybe pick a more restrictive modding engine or cut out obvious fetish and meme material from evaluation? Even gems of games ala Factorio 1.0 aren't really as good as their peak mods ala Space Exploration. If you limited to larger scale overhaul style mods I think your economic argument starts collapsing quickly