[michaelt]

As I understand it the games industry has made some "innovations" since I was a gamer back in the 1990s - such as pre-orders, paid early access, DLC, micropayments, retailer-exclusive content, Google Play and Apple App Store, releases of buggy and untested games that just plain won't run, extensive DRM and so on.

Many gamers feel [1] where in the past you paid $a for a complete game, today you pay $a for a fraction of the game then an extra $b and $c and $d and $e through these extra mechanisms.

I suspect some people saw the 75% profit margin, and felt this was more about adding on $f, a new mechanism to transfer yet more money from gamers to big publishers, rather than anything to do with rewarding mod creators.

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/743258-video-game-logic