Let's talk about mod support. (Patreon)

Last month, I tried to round up some people to help test mod tools. Unfortunately, I've been unable to secure any real help for testing the tools, which makes me extremely nervous; not even the most dedicated players with an express interest in modding seem to care much about the feature, which makes me feel like I've potentially wasted hundreds of hours of dev time on this feature. Basically I can think of a few ways to go from here, and I need some help making that choice.

Normally polls are limited to $10 patrons, but this is a pretty important decision and effects promised features for all patrons, so I want to know what everyone thinks.

1. Bring mod support and tools to the free edition.

Option 1 is just to go to the free edition and release the tools (and the mod support feature) to everyone. The idea here is that I can cast the widest net possible and hopefully get at least a few people to try out the tools and put them through their paces.

2. Open testing up to all patrons and see what happens.

The testing of mod tools was never intended to be super limited, but I wanted to help a small number of modders get started; I figured a small number of folks (3-5) would be easy for me to interact with and manage. I want to be clear that I know people are busy and these modders are paying me so they don't owe me anything at all, period. This is not their fault. I vastly overestimated the interest in this feature.

This option is basically just to release the mod tools and documentation to all patrons and see what happens. Only a very small number of patrons expressed interest when I was asking for testers, but maybe more will be interested in using the tools if I just release them.

3. Only use this feature for official content (i.e., cancel mod support).

Mod support as a feature is quite far along, but the documentation and tooling is not as far along and will require testing and user feedback. I'm sort of at a midpoint right now; I've put hundreds of hours into mod support, but there's hundreds of hours more work to do in the future and it's work I really can't do all on my own.

That said, canceling mod tools is not a total waste of effort. Even if I stop developing mod tools and documentation, I can still use the mod support features that exist to deliver patron-only content, and maybe some other stuff in the future. The feature is still nice to have, at least.

The idea behind this option is just to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. I designed the game always wanting to have mod support, and I've been working on it in the background since before the first release, but maybe it was never really a good idea at all, maybe it was never really a value-add for players, and I just need to spend my time and energy elsewhere.