Is it strictly a developer decision to allow thier games to be moddable or not ? And how is it achieved ? Are moddable games “coded” differently than non-moddable games ?
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Two big things to have for mods. The first is to make the game with that in mind. As a dev, you have to take decision everytime during the process of making a game. How much money can the player carry? What stats can impact the player? How are weapons configured in the settings?
And if you want people to be able to change something, you’ve gotta make sure that your game doesn’t go up in smoke when new stuff is introduced. Oh, the modder added a new weapons? Integer overflow on damage, thing does nothing. They removed the cap on money? Yay, they can buy the end game upgrade by farming the early bushes for 2h! You need to be so much more careful to prevent mods from breaking stuff too much.
And second: You need to create the tools to mod your own game. Because people will use these tools. So now you have a 2nd program to maintain for modding the game. Which depending on how moddable your game is can be twice the work.
With recent years, a lot of things has changed in particular on the tool side of things. Unity and other powerful game design tools can not only be used to create your game, but also to mod it. Meaning if you decide to make a Unity game, you can just not care about a mod tool and let modders use Unity as well.
All in all, modding is a very powerful way to keep players engaged years after a singe player’s game release (Skyrim, Rimworld, Stellaris, Crusader kings 2/3) but they require extra work to produce. They can also eventually make you the enemy of the community if you’re not careful. If the game works and some very impactful mod exist, people could be angrier at the dev for making more content if it breaks their mods rather than happy to see more stuff. It also mean that if you’re not good or fast enough, mods will develop your game faster than you can keep up with and any update you can make will be redundant leading to reduced sales.
Example of this: Rimworld. The latest DLC added the ability to control machines, control the genetics of your characters and have children. All things that were already available in mods for more than 2 years. Sure the implementation was not the same, but Pawnmorpher, birds and bees and what the hack did all that. Fortunately for Rimworld, it’s an absolutely amazing game and the devs at this point know that they should focus a lot on sturdy mechanics than plentiful content as the modders will do the rest. But not all game will see it that way.
Bethesda is the opposite side of the coin. Where every single update they made for Skyrim is seen as a personal attack by half the community because it breaks so many impactful mods, many of which the author has long left and did not leave the source code available. These mods are forever dead forcing players to chose between not upgrading and keeping their nice old mod they love, or upgrading and enjoying the new stuff.
Mods are great, but they’re a headache and if you’re not careful, you can lose control of it. And it’s a lot of work to get working.
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