In a forthcoming interview with AusGamers, DayZ production assistant and original mod team member, Matthew Lightfoot, reveled in the success of their popular DayZ mod, which is on the cusp of being released as a stand-alone game thanks to its continued success.

"We’re still coming to terms with some of things," he says with an anxious smile. "People are still streaming DayZ, and getting thousands of followers every night, and this is on a buggy mod for a three year old game -- we just didn’t think it was going to happen."

Of course, there have been many developers downplaying the importance of mods and the mod community in more recent times, something Lightfoot is happy to rebel against in the sheer success of their own product.

"The exec producer on Battlefield: Bad Company said something along the lines of “modding is dead”; well we certainly buried it alive didn’t we," he says with a laugh. "I loved ArmA because of the customisability: you could download a mod and get a new aircraft -- there was so many mods for it, and that’s what kept me playing. I’ve sunk thousands of hours into ArmA before DayZ even came about, and it expanded the lifecycle of the game indefinitely.

"So I certainly don’t think modding is dead. When you look at Half-Life and Black Mesa on the Source Engine, these things are huge games. So I don’t think it’s likely to die in the foreseeable future."

The actual comment Lightfoot is likely referring to is one from DICE's Patrick Bach who said in an interview with our friends over at Gameplanet that "modding is a declining trend".

"It’s sad to say," Bach said. "We’ve seen some cool mods but since games are getting more complicated to build, it’s also getting more complicated to mod them, so it’s a declining trend as we see it. Sad but true."

Stay tuned for our full interview with Matthew Lightfoot coming soon.