Since it's been a while and no one has offered to play me on the IRC, I figure there's no need for a live game since it's hard to organize with work schedules and time zones and other nonsense.
So, feel free to join my unlimited time game here - https://lichess.org/yreJI9in
First one to join gets to play me. I picked a random side.
-TheRedArmy
Mmhmm. Starcraft didn't even include everything the devs had, only some of the stuff - they really put a lot more potential into the Warcraft III campaign editor, and it shows in the really detailed, innovative maps that came out, for both games.
I think there might be some games or genres where the developer tools extend the life cycle - you can see bits of it with games like GTA 5 or the Halo forge editors - but having a true tool to make completely wacky and out of the blue stuff might not come back again. It's hard to say.
Sure, all of the tools will almost never be shipped with the game largely because many of the tools are either very unpolished (90% of all game development tools) or are plug-ins to external tools like Max, Maya or Photoshop where shipping those plug-ins has a lot of issues (like plug-ins that only support say Maya 2014 release X and breaks in every single other version). A huge part of AAA game development unfortunately involves a lot of tribal knowledge of the tools for wprking around issues like "prevent this from screwing up in the lightmapping system", performance, or "don't use these two checkboxes together or something crashes and we don't have time to figure out why".
As games, engines and tools get more and more complicated, it gets increasingly harder to make tools that can to A-Z when certain games want ABC, other games want DEF and other games want XYZ.
That being said, many games do have a stable development platform like the campaign editor or even SC map editor that is polished and should be shipped with the game. That is actually becoming increasingly rarer with the influx of 3rdParty engines like Unity, Unreal, Coco, Cry, etc. because with many of those engines you actually cannot redistribute source.
It really makes me so sad that so few games ship with innate modding ability like a lot of the older games did. That kept games alive for years beyond their expected life cycle, and are responsible for some of the most played games and genres today (CS, DOTA and Tower Defense being some of the prime examples). Less than 5% of the games I have worked on have shipped actual developer tools with the game, and those are the ones I loved working on the best because they had such a great community response (and even ESRB, publisher, news, etc responses).
There are so many game engine choices out there to use today, many of them free, but creating a game from scratch in any of them takes either a lot of time or a lot of experience. The great thing about shipping developer tools with a game is that those tools were made to create a specific type of game (you do not have to do any camera setup, animation programming, event systems, sound programming, etc.), while trying to do a similar game in other engines can force you to touch every subsystem out there.
Maybe someday there will be a push away from "pre-ordering ammo crates" and instead go back to "here's the game, and you get the tools we used to create it"...like it used to be in the glory days.