Hi, yeah, dev here, let me add a few more points to this.
Modders do not have deadlines. We do, and they often are handed down by people who don’t give a flying fuck about our well-being or, yes, technical limitations. I have shipped some hellaciously bad code, you guys, because of execs who decided we were going to ship a feature three weeks early, consequences be damned. I’ve been pushed into a monthlong crunch that never needed to happen, because management was in too much of a hurry to actually let us do things right. And I’m not even working on AAA titles, we don’t have nearly as much pressure from investors as they do. You want to know why you can hardly play Knights of the Old Republic II without an extensive mod? It’s because LucasArts suddenly wanted it by Christmas, no matter what the devs at Obsidian told them about its real state of readiness. But the people who made the massive hoard of Dragon Age haircut mods that I have installed? Did not have a deadline for those. Amazing what you can get done when you’re able to budget your project time however the hell you want. (I do specify project time, because OF COURSE many modders have school and jobs and what have you. But whatever time they spend on the mod, that’s by their own pacing.)
Executive meddling also prevents us from putting in features we really want to give you sometimes.
Not every game dev is a designer, mate. Often when something doesn’t make it into the game, it’s because they were missing resourcing in a given discipline. I can write you beautiful code; I can’t make beautiful haircuts for your avatar. If there aren’t enough artists on my team because of management’s resourcing decisions, and the ones we have are tied up on assets for key NPCs and backgrounds, then we are going to be S.O.L. on the extra haircuts front.
This is not to say resourcing decisions are absolved from all criticism, of course; if a game has the resourcing for 10 light skintones and includes 0 dark skintones, then it had the resourcing for 5 light skintones and 5 dark skintones, and someone made a bad decision re:inclusion and that is ABSOLUTELY very much worth criticizing. But depending on resourcing, the plausible solution there may have been to make sure they have 10 diverse skin tones; having there be 20 may have been out of reach.
Related to not every dev being a designer, I want to get this out there: Not all game dev roles are paid equally. QA (who are INCREDIBLY important) and artists are grossly underpaid, and in many places so are designers. Engineers tend to fare better, but I know there are still some fairly beloved game companies in the area that do not pay their engineers enough to live nearby. (Most of the games industry is incidentally centered in some VERY expensive areas; the Bay Area, LA, Seattle, and so forth.) The point made further up the thread about there being no union in this industry is relevant here. There have been rumblings lately and I really hope we can get something started, but for the time being, there’s no organization protecting people’s jobs (you know what else we have a lot of? mass layoffs due to poor planning by execs!), wages, and working conditions like that. Overall the OP’s implication that because professional devs can’t do some of the things that modders can do for free, somehow means they shouldn’t be able to make a living off their work, is pretty godawful.
I have no intention of implying that game devs are above criticism. There are SO MANY issues with video games, my dudes. And I appreciate the hell out of modders, both from the “they make a bunch of stuff I like” player standpoint and the “important relationship with the dev community” standpoint! But their role is fundamentally different from ours, and the implication that their free work somehow invalidates the facts that we do this for our job, are subject to executive requirements that they are not, and need to make a living off our job, is bullshit. PLEASE keep applying constructive criticism to games, and PLEASE keep modding if it brings you joy, and support modders that do. But as it turns out it’s 300% possible to do that without being a shitbagel about it.
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