An article on GameSpy by a developer who worked on Homeworld discusses the merits and efforts involved in making a game modifiable by the public. Which got me wondering, just how valuable is this to the success of a game as a whole? Is this really a feature that developers should spend months of time on? Sure there are a number of examples in the PC market of games that went from good to great based on being modifiable (mostly in the FPS genre) but ponder this...

Do you suppose of the hundreds of games that developers out there spent an extra 3+ months of dev time making a game modifiable instead worked on just tweaking their game to make it more fun, would we have more good games on average? Is the value system of developers being tainted by the vocal minority? There are some real ho-hum games out there with great tools that hardly anyone is using...

This is just my unresearched assumption and ignorance filled rambling, but you've come to expect that by now I hope!