Dean Hall, probably more well known as the bloke behind DayZ, had a rather interesting response to an audience question while speaking at the PC Gaming World Congress at PAX Prime. The question, which asked about the industry trend towards server-side games and what that means for modding - citing the modding community that rose up around SimCity 4, and then compared that to the latest release - was met with the response.

"Well, I don't want to kick SimCity while it's down, but I suspect that was probably part of the design. It's like, I think that if DICE wanted to kill Arma, all they'd need to do is release some modding tools tomorrow. It always really hurt me when Battlefield 2 was the end in terms of modding, so I'm pretty obviously supportive of the whole modding idea. But like you're saying, that's the challenge that we're trying to deal with with DayZ at the moment. How do we have the stability and security of an online community like Wargaming has, at the same time as support modding? I don't have the answer for that."

Chris Roberts, who was also on the panel, said that he was looking at a halfway point for Star Citizen.

"You definitely can mod and you can run your own servers, but if you want to be on the big persistent universe everyone else is on, obviously you can't mod in that situation, because it wouldn't work if someone built a battleship that could blow everyone up."

He then later brought up Freelancer, saying that people are still playing it because "there are all these great mods for it....it's amazing, it's like nine years later, it's an old game, but [modding] has kept it alive. I think modding is important in the PC world, User Generated content is a major part of PC Gaming, and if you don't embrace it in your game at some point I think it hurts you."
What role has modding played in your continued enjoyment of games?