Am I understanding this correctly? Ubisoft is allowing third party mods of their 17 year old game that still requires a legal copy to run the mod? While good for the developers and fans, that hardly seems like a concession from Ubisoft
REMIX is a bit different it extracts resources from the game so you could rework and replace them.
Additive only modding is arguably easy, however mods in which you extract and rework assets are more tricky since those assets are protected by their own copyright.
There could be cases in which the licensing agreement that covers those assets may not be compatible with modding since the license the publisher and developer have received is rather restrictive - speedtree generated assets come to mind as Autodesk(?) has or had a rather restrictive license on those, store bought art assets these days also probably have a non mod friendly license.
Then there is the whole thing around using trademark names in your sites and content.
Overall you want an approval especially for a large scale remaster mod.
And publishers/developers that may appear hostile to modders may actually have a valid reason rather than doing it just out of spite.
When I worked at EA it felt so weird to be talking at the office about how cool some mod projects were while simultaneously being forced to implement features specifically designed to make modding much harder.
I've been modding games of EA for over 10 years. I even helped out with a project associated to Battleforge, which was shut down in 2013. But when people tried to go near Microsoft oh wow... they go nuclear and they do it fast.
It's still a separate entity with different legal departments.
To be fair, my experience dates back to around 2005 to 2010.
There is also an anecdote of the "Halogen" mod which wanted to recreate Halo as an RTS (years before Ensemble Studios announced their Halo RTS). Of course they got a cease and desist.
EA has quietly condoned tons of modding projects in the past. Command and Conquer: Generals had a massive modding community and EA allowed them carte blanche, as long as it didn't allow piracy.
I mean, I know "urggh, EA" and they're the big bad and all. And I have plenty of reasons to hate them, but this just sounds like a kneejerk response.
