Number one: We want to take some of these developers who are not doing this for their full-time job right now, but want to make a living making games. We want to make those dreams come true. Number two: We’d like to be able to do some of these things and get them to a platform where everybody can play on. Most of these mods are only PC and a lot of people are not able to play them. So if we can take some of these amazing people, have them help us make a port and put it on the store where everybody can get it, that’s what we’re trying to do.
RIP free mods for future games. Guess devs have to eat I suppose.
Was nice while it lasted
Not sure how you can see that as a negative thing. Having mods become official titles on the store helps them to have a bigger audience, makes it a lot more accessible to lazy people like myself, and enables devs to spend more time working on them. Doing it the official way with the original studios also speeds up the development drastically (instead of reverse engineering them). And I bet that way we’ll get mods that never would’ve existed otherwise.
It’s not just about “having something to eat” for devs, people that do this usually have a job that pays and do the modding in their free time. Enabling them to work full time on mods with actual documentation and the original source code would probably lead to a lot more ports, higher quality and faster.
They also mentioned that having studios see their own game in VR can lead to them being more interested in VR which can only be a good thing.
Also, unless you already owned the modded game, you usually still have to buy the flatscreen version. So they never even were free in the first place.