Really it depends on what the game modded is. Bethesda games are 100% singleplayer.. so they know modding adds to the replay value. (Elder Scrolls Online will naturally have a zero-hacking policy being an MMO, and will discourage ANY modding, although I imagine they'll turn a semi-blind eye to stuff that doesn't change anything but aesthetics and moreso doesn't change balance either like say a special targetting or wallhack mod would). Dragon Age Origins was singleplayer only and was based off the legacy of Neverwinter Nights so it had a toolset. Said NWN was designed from the ground-up to be a platform FOR modding and multiplayer play, having little itself, so in turn of course it had a toolset. Rockstar was nice and allowed modding (since the pc ports were far superior to the console versions, you could tell they enjoyed making them and having mods would sell them even better). Then of course Hot Coffee hit, and they had to change policy and are anti-modding.
Valve LOVES modding, releasing the full set of tools and some source. Part of that is because they can sell the engine, but part of that is they watch the mod community very carefully, and when they see something good will buy it up and use the people to make a commercial game. In fact, Valve themselves made the Half Life games, and I think (but aren't sure of) Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. However, Portal? A mod. (Portal 2 was in house by people who made the first mod). TF2? Based on the TFC mod that was made by people they hired. Counterstrike? Same. The list goes on. Really, almost all the games 'they' made were made by finding the right people via mods made, and hiring them.
Sadly, Valve is an exception. They know what they're doing amazingly, no one else would have thought of something like Steam that started as a system forced with HL2 (which was the reason it took off, bundling it with a must-have game). And now? We're modding a game that is ONLY on Steam. You have to use Steam, and then you see the other stuff sold, and go "Well, maybe this, it's on sale" and next thing you know you have 3 pages of games library and have sunk hundreds of dollars in. Plus, they can put money into the games no one expects.. it's cheap for them to take a finished indie game and put it in the catalogue, push it a bit. It sells well, the developers make another, or might even be hired. Unfortunately the other publishers play catch-up, like Origin which is really a place for EA stuff only, and has nothing to recommend it.
So yeah. Volition doesn't support mods, but they do in a way by turning a blind eye. There's lots of developers and publishers who do worse (Squaresoft comes to mind) and the list who actively support is shrinking (well, for non-indie devs. Indie devs haven't hit the point a publisher controls them or they worry about getting a bad rep among publishers). Sure Volition people might read this forum (hi guys!
) but they all tend to have NDAs and can't talk unless official policy suddenly said "Ok, allow modding". The best we could hope for would be a change in policies (doubtful) or someone risking their job with a very careful internal leak (like say a piece of sourcecode from their tool that turns the xtbls into compressed binary data files, so we can see how it's laid out). That'd have to be done in a way that it couldn' be traced back, and considering all it would take is one mistake here of someone saying "thanks to someone at Volition for this data" to make an internal hunt for the leaker and then a simple log-check would find them and they'd be fired and sued for breach of NDA and possible corporate espionage (sure it's not, but they'd throw that as an additional charge to try to up the awarded fees and any settlement)... yeah. I doubt it'll happen.
Too bad. We can probably figure out a lot eventually, but a great deal may well be packed into the exe and untouchable, which isn't uncommon when they don't intend the game to have to be moddable (various things in how it works like the difficult asm indexing of everything, the use of binary compressed files, lack of some calls, the fact that the preload doesn't understand the DLC packs.. all suggests such) so we're not gonna get too far with a lot sadly.
Who knows, maybe SR4 will be semi-moddable. THe problem nowadays is many publishers go for consoles exclusively (with lazy port at best), and consoles can't do modding, so you're only promoting a small section of your profits for a smaller increase in sales, yet requiring a lot of time to change design if it's not moddable. (Yeah, doesn't say anything about just releasing internal file breakdown, but eh)
