Meanwhile I am playing a fan translation of a game that people made for free by people that will get nothing in return.
Bandai has never released the game in english because they don't think they'll make enough profit, despite fans urging them.
Passion and time is what creates things.
Profit hinders just as many things as it helps create.
The STALKER fandom is insane with this, there is just a straight up standalone version of the game now, ported to 64-bit architecture and mods of all kinds keep coming out despite the last release being 2009.
EDIT: To drive the point home, there's a sizeable subsection of the STALKER Fandom that hasn't actually played any of the original games
Hell, Team Fortress, DOTA, and Counter-Strike are maybe Valve's three largest franchises. 2 were free mods for half life originally, one was a custom Warcraft 3 map.
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Balancing maps is hard, but something thread-related is how in Starcraft 1 & 2 the maps shift season to season and they're almost all made for free by fans of the game (at one point there were paid map makers, but that era of the game ended and unique maps are still getting made).
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Yes. And then from that spawned the Call of Chernobyl mod, which stitched together every previous map, added some features and basically just lets you free roam the zone. Sort of "roleplay your own story" thing, allthough there is a new main quest if you want one. That required you own Call of Pripyat though, albeit I'm pretty sure mostly for licensing reasons.
And then from that spawned Stalker: Anomaly which is the standalone version of Call of Chernobyl, where the old-ass X-Ray Engine was ported to 64 bit. It adds a fair bit of features by itself, but then for that mod turned standalone version of the game there is, again, loads and loads of mods.