Marketing.

Windows said it.

I haven't heard of 2 of the mods you just named so haven't played them simply because I don't know they even exist.

I have heard of them, I enjoyed most of them, I enjoyed playing mods, like Obsidian Conflict until it hit the shit fan, but I am still a mighty fan of Sven coop :)

I wished people played zombie master :(

What you have to remember is that 99.99% of gamers are dipshits (cough). They see a mod, download it, and don't know how the fuck to install it. So they delete it and play Call of Duty.

i'd say it distribution and marketing that kill most mods. ppl are to dumb to figure out how to install mods, and even if they do happen to have a installer or steam page, most ppl are to nervous about modding their games or getting viruses, ext, to bother with it. as to marketing, well, advertisements are the best way to get your game known and ppl wanting to try it... but they cost money. mods run on another games source code, meaning they cant charge for the mod without licensing the engine, so they have nothing to pay for advertisements with and, sadly, nothing to gain by doing so. tis a vicious cycle. FPSBanana was positioned to break that cycle a couple years back, but its been to messed lately to do any good.

Mods that are avaible on steam are actually played at around 500+ at same time. But that's because they are easier to install and were marketed at some time when they announced that they would allow mods to be downloadable trough steam.

It's because 80% of mods fail to bring anything really interesting or great to the table. Insurgency just seems so generic now compared to when it first came out. Plus the developers couldn't decide what they wanted to do with the game and got their panties in a twist over people making certain modifications to the game (optics on non-optic weapons etc). So instead of doing the rational thing and adding something like svpure, they decided to just ban all transparency and selfillum effects and for what? Competitive league playing? Really? Meanwhile they put off all the custom modders and killed player interest in the game.

Players these days crave new content and DLCs. They want new content in their games to keep it fresh and they want it fast. These are things that only really large companies have the financial backing to provide. Mod teams are small and work for free or on minimal pay in their spare time. It's a labor of love and try as they might these smaller developers just can't keep the interest of today's ADD gamers-always wanting after the next big game update in their favorite franchise. So, naturally, players lose interest over time.

This is why games that have large modding communities behind them tend to remain popular because someone is always creating something new for it. You could say it's a Catch-22 situation, without the modders the game won't be popular but if the game doesn't hit it big in the first place it can't attract modders. Some games are just doomed to (relative) obscurity. Add to that modding a mod is unstable, you might recall how many Insurgency skins got broken as updates came along and many of their creators didn't have time or interest for fixing them to work with the new updates. You never know if your hard work gone into the custom content for a mod will still work for said mod from one update to the next.