Computer aristocracy

One of the benefits of buying video games on a PC is modability - the ability to go into your copy of the game and change stuff, add stuff etc.  OR at least it use to be. The online sales market has grown to the point where gaming companies now sell small changes in the game for 1-2$ a shot and thus have very little motivation to leave the game open to modification by the user. When it once was just a matter of changing a few numbers around in a simple spreadsheet, these days you need to learn the companies private programing language in order to make changes. This severly limits the number of people who can actually make modifications and eliminates the not for profit competition to modification/downloadable content sales.

I came upon a interesting article about how BASIC, one of the computer languages I learned to use as a kid, is no longer included on the PC. I wonder if this is another effort to limit the population of people with the power to aguement computers. 'Cause if we cant make changes ourselves we'll have to buy it from Them.