Mods = Sales
Indie developers need to listen up, here, and listen good. This is very important. The more modifiable your game is, the more sales you'll get, and I can tell you that this is Universally true.
But consider this: There are people out there with dysphorias, such as gender, species, and ethnicity. So forcing your players to adopt the role of a white, male human is the worst thing you can do. And if your game can't be modded, then that's what you're doing. So it's up to you to make that difference, to say that it can be modded, that creative people can change the assets to be whatever they like.
My dysphoria is horrible of late, so I've been playing games almost exclusively where I don't have to be a human. In TF2, I can be a bear, a raptor, or a robot; in Portal 2, I can be a robot.Those games are wonderful wonderlands or wonder, as the content never runs out. I can (and will) keep playing them in lieu of anything and everything else. I recently noticed Don't Starve, purely because of the Steam Workshop mods that added non-humans, there's even a werewolf in the works. (And I'm not even talking about the one I'm working on.)
But yes, recently, I looked at Path to the Sky as I was interested in it. Then I looked at the character -- white, male human. I tried my best to not immediately lose interest, I scanned the page desperately for any hint of modifiable assets, then gave up. I closed it and moved on, that was a lost sale where otherwise it wouldn't have been with modifiable assets.
The thing is is that, hey, I'm not telling you to create playable characters which are other genders, ethnicities, even species. I'm not. All I'm saying is that if you leave the assets of your game open, I can change them, as can others. Got a flying game? I can change those planes into dragons with jetpacks. Instant sale! All you have to do is give me access to your assets and a slight explanation of how they work.
That's it.
I can see so many lost sales that would otherwise have turned into sales were the game in question to have left its assets open. I'm not even saying 'go open source' or something crazy like that. I'm just saying that if your assets exist in a way that can be modified, people will modify them, and sales will happen. If your game uses simpler graphics (like Path to the Sky, or even Don't Starve), then it's a sure fire bet that you'll have lots of mods. Those mods will lead to hundreds of extra sales.
And it makes me sad to see that developers lack the awareness to do this. Is it really so hard to leave your assets open? You don't even need to include Steam Workshop support or anything like that. All you have to do is leave your assets open, creative people will open your game up to many other audiences that wouldn't otherwise play it.
Consider this: I have one friend that's sick of thin, beautiful people in games. If I could mod for her a tastefully done chubby lady, she'd gain more interest. You wouldn't have to do this. You'd just have to leave your assets open. You'd think this would be a common-sense no-brainer. Yet many developers don't do it, I look in the folders and I see packed, often encrypted files. That's a damn shame. You're losing out.
So I implore developers, especially indie developers, to leave their assets open. Unless you're using something like Unity, it's only a tiny bit of work for you to do so. I know this as a coder, myself. I'm not one of those people who can be convinced that it would take you off of fixing bugs or making content. So I'm going to shake my head sadly at and not buy any game that doesn't have open assets. Because I can't.
I don't want to play humans. My lady friend doesn't want to play thin men. I think there are probably a lot of people out there like that.
You're ignoring a massive, untapped audience. That's really dumb.
Why would you throw away easy money?