Yep they don't want modding.
NFS4 was modded to the eye-balls with copied cars, content and tracks 25 years ago!
It didn't stop the company making NFS5 which also got modded with copied content.
Then NFS6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 blah blah blah.
25 years ago developers probably worried about mods in NFS4, hurting sales for NFS5, and NFS6, etc... even people cracked into GT (PD) games and nicked their content. I remember people adding full new cars to NFS5... Carrera GT!
But they all made money, made new games, and the sky didn't fall down because people could download pretty much every car that'd ever existed up to that point in NFS4! And even if 90% of it was just crappy mods by 15 year olds... we definitely ALL started somewhere (mine was decent Ruf 911s in NFS Porsche)
What KS are saying is that they want to copy their own content and sell it to you in their next version, again and again... because otherwise "the community" will copy that content again and again, and have it for free.
Think about the whole idea now of peak (or very sufficient) visual fidelity in cars and tracks. Good mods made today for free, will likely be very good mods forever.
Throw in possibly AI helping along and the ability for modders to get extra quality for little extra effort.
And let's not pretend this industry creates every new car and track from scratch each time.
Even 15 years ago I'd made NURBS cars (and I know for example that Stecki who made some cars for Racer 20 year ago) was making them in NURBS in Maya, and then you can retopo them (tools are now very efficient) in relative quick time. Or you can just strip out rows and optimise.
OR, manufacturers send you CAD (I've worked on a bunch of CAD cars 10-15 years ago), so the poly density, flow, blah blah, can all be set in retopo tools.
Even looking back at the top spec models for GT5 (PD) in photo-mode, they're stunning. They clearly made VERY high detail models and baked normals and diffuse/albedo maps from them, and they'll be re-leveraging those same HQ models (likely made with good UVs and quads) down their chain again each time.
I even remember Porsche releasing a 3D configurator on their website (time of 997 GT3 mk2 iirc) and I lifted their 100k poly meshes from it.
The idea that these car meshes are somehow super hard work to make and come by is just nonsense, yes there is time invested in them, once, and then that's it. You have a dense quad mesh of a car. You're not doing all that work again and again each time you make that car.
Same with tracks. Likely they're made in very high detail and then baked down. If they were made off scans, and the track hasn't changed, no work is really needed at all.
If a section is re-worked, that is re-scanned and made, arguably very quickly. As noted, 10-15 years ago the top dev teams were using amazing tools for this process. It isn't and shouldn't be considered 'new' product unless it's brand new.
So yes still some work maybe for each new release, but not like reworking the whole lot.
I'd bet half the content out there in more niche simmy land is derived from content that came before. I know lots of stuff went from GTR2 > rF > sim users, in some cases with up-ressed surfaces (scanned etc)... indeed where did GTR2s original stuff come from? Partial lifts from elsewhere?
Sounds? Probably just tweaking again, possibly from source files to deployed files.
Textures? Possibly, again just tweaking in source (PSDs, something else? Depends what you use, but chances are they'll be authored at 8K and double the size you'd ever want them to be)
And generally, content now is just sooooo good. This isn't like 1998 when a GPU was pushing 1mill triangles per second, then a few years later it was four or fives times as many, and car meshes went from 4k to 12k polys... we have millions of triangles per frame at 100fps+... cars and tracks (at least in source models/files) have had sufficient fidelity now for a decade.
We've firmly gone into re-processing existing materials and re-selling it as if they'd made it from scratch... and with game engines increasingly made in UE, they're not even doing any work there... it literally is taking mostly existing high fidelity library content and dropping it into a newer engine (provided by your supplier), and selling it again with a full price.
Meanwhile modders who can make excellent mods are only likely to remove a revenue stream.
And the 'bad' modders are then used as an excuse.
Even if the bad modders disappeared tomorrow and left only the good, they'd not suddenly embrace the good modding scene.
Which is exactly why, imo, the modding scene should set up shop in a true open sim, as the level of talent out there to make both top end content and an engine (inside UE) for free is abundant.
KS should really just be more pragamatic, make it great for modding, and then gain sales from all the people who want it for modding.
Those people might also buy DLCs, as well as free mods.
And those people who just copy everything in sight, well chances are they wouldn't be buying anything any way if they couldn't download rubbish conversions etc.
They seem terrified of just making a great finished game with mods as it might kill their own future market.
And they're right. Which is why they'll never finish a game off properly, and which is why after AC1 from early access and one DLC pack, I'll never give them a penny again (though I did pay £3 in the seaside arcade the other day and drove the McLaren P1 on a motion sim, what a let-down)
