Quote Originally Posted by Dead Guy View Post
They're not going to give you modding tools, because they have figured out they can make sub-par "mods" and sell them for 5$ every other month to thousands of customers who reason that 5$ is so little money it doesn't matter.

If gamers started pumping out mods for free, this business model would be completely defunct. You want your modding tools? Stop buying their reskinned models instead of joining yet another facebook group. Five bucks per dissatisfied customer hurts way more than a list of names.
I'm not sure if that's what they're thinking, and if it is, well, they aren't very smart. Look, probably 95% of people that have played Total War games have never installed a user created mod. The 5% that do are the die hard fans of the franchise (like us!). Now, those 95% of casual players may be enticed to buy content from CA because of advertising from Steam and such, but since there's no real advertising for user created mods, there's really no competition for that 95% of the market. Now the 5% of die hard fans who've bought the last 4 or 5 games are a small enough percentage of users that losing their business shouldn't matter. In fact, if CA released good modding tools, they'd actually come out ahead because the long time fans give advertising dollars and future sales.

A good example of these principles is Bethesda Softworks, the guys behind games like Oblivion and Fallout 3. They've made plenty of money off of Downloadable Content for Oblivion and Fallout 3 despite releasing very extensive modding tools.