Sega/CA publishing mods ?

[Lord Adherbal]

This is something I've been thinking about, and altho it might be an utterly stupid and worthless idea but I'd still like to discuss it :)

As you all know Valve's Halflife has been one of the most succesfull PC games ever. And a big reason for their succes was the mods made by the community (CS, DoD, ...). These mods were so popular that Valve ended up making deals with the mod teams and selling new Halflife copies with mods included.

The TW games have a huge modding community (for RTS standards anyway), with over a dozen mods reaching very high quality levels (RTR, EB, ChivTW, SPQR, NTW, ...) and dozens more promising mods in early development stage.
So I wonder if CA/Sega ever considered releasing a special RTW pack or Mod pack including the most popular mods. I'm sure this would benifit both the modders and CA/Sega. The vast majority of RTW customers and casual gamers probably doesnt visit RTW forums or doesnt even have internet. So all those people do currently not have access to the mods. And I bet a lot of gamers would be anxious to play a massive scale RTS game based on the Napoleonic era, Sengoku Jidai, Middle Ages, Renaissance, .... So that means a lot of extra money for Sega/CA for almost no efford, and a vastly larger userbase for the mods.

Just a tought.

[Colovion]

*hopefull*

[ChaosLord]

CA doesn't seem to think realism or complexity is whats wanted though, and most mods are aimed at a certain theme as well as making the game harder. (Slower battles, better AI through tweaks, etc...). Of course, Activision could have been the one that told them to dumb it down and in that case it might be up to Sega on wether mods aimed at realism and balance as well as various themes would ever get picked up and put on a special cd to be sold.

Theres also the hurdle of making sure all mod content isn't copyrighted anywhere which would probably be the bigger issue stopping it from happening.