More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
No, that’s too much of a stretch. Half-Life is it’s own game, they licensed and then modified Quake’s engine. That’d be like calling Satisfactory a mod of Fortnite.
Yes, as is Counter-Strike.
Yes, mod is short for modification.
The distinction you’re drawing seems pretty arbitrary to me. Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding. They were more closely tied to the original game’s internals, and they were harder to make, but they were still mods. Even today, it’s not uncommon for mods to add features to or change behavior in an engine, via loaders or DLLs.
I suppose it’s a matter of one’s perspective.