As long as you have to force users to create github account, merge with epic account, find a mail that often goes to spam to confirm the link, download git repo, paste into folder with your game content that they downloaded through steam (and they wonder why can’t they have those few dlls and exes there as well), force them to re-download that again every time you update your game - modding is extremely excruciating experience.
Not to mention that you have to host and upload all the binaries with each next update and patch. Yeah, Git supports devs pretty nicely and you can automate that, but that’s another thing to do, along with everything you have to do on steam to upload new files to depot, create DRMs and so on. Gets old real quick.
We’ve shipped two titles with modding using UE4, and the number of mods isn’t high. We’ve created tutorials, explained in detail what users have to do and yet our support mailbox was spammed, as were steam forums. Many questions were asked as to why is it the way it is. Once people get into modding and find it fun, they’ll continue, but the first setup is FAR too cumbersome for many to overcome.
We’ve tried. Really. We wrote our own custom app that deals with the entire git by itself (stores passwords if the user allows, so just double click on exe to refresh binaries from latest git upload). This didn’t help at all. The worst step is the first one, why make it the hardest? People bailed on the start setup in the vast majority of cases. Tutorials with screens didn’t help.
Will that ever change? We’re close to releasing a third title, years pass on and this nonsense is still kept. This topic alone is over 2 years. No response to e-mails asking that question either. We’d like it to have mods, but after previous experience - I just see no hope. Only selected few, who really want to do it really hard, will ever get to try. Typical user is not a developer who deals with this kind of stuff every day.
I’m pretty sure you know all that. As I’m pretty sure it’s gonna stay like this for other reasons. Still, instead of another carrot in the form of “4.17 is gonna be cool” that I’ve heard several times about modding, please try hitting the wall I’m describing instead. We can fix technical issues. We’ve done it (probably not as nice as actual engine devs can, but still). We cannot move past legal issues as easily.