Over the last few days ive been totally disgusted by The amount of shamelessly Ungrateful, self entitlement comments Ive read about the Steam workshop Paid mods system. Some folks are so selfish that they expect modders to spend months developing mods & they should not be allowed to benefit from there own investment, Just because they are too tight to spend a few coins as a thank you to support the developer of a mod, yet they have no problem purchasing crappy DLC. Whats even worse is that most of the ones making all these EXTREME hyperbole comments have never even modded a game in there life! and have zero idea of the work Involved. Speaking from personal experience as a modder essentially all modders mod a game they are invested in playing but will end up modding more than playing it( I only managed to complete 50% of skyrim) most of my time was supporting and improving my mod for others to enjoy. But you come to a point when you question why you are still supporting a mod for a game you stopped playing nearly a year ago, why are you spending all these hours every night or the weekend for no personal gain when you could be developing a small indie game or creating game assets you could sell. People need to realise that some of modders have busy lives, jobs, familys to support, and money problems of our own, and there limited time is extremely precious to them. If a modder could get some much needed financial support for a pc upgrade or a looming bill he's struggling to pay, from modding for others Why the hell shouldn't he be able to do that!, who the hell has the right to tell him he shouldn't When nobody's forcing them to buy it.
Every 3D artist working in game development would also expect to get paid. I think the paid mods system is a brilliant idea and definitely a step in the right direction but the implementation is awful and percentage margins of profit are hideous and need to be changed currently as a modder I will not use this system until more profit goes to the modder.
There will always be free mods but that does not mean there should not also be a system for really amazing mods that fans can support devs with a minor fee which could also attract talented devs who would never bother with modding in the first place.
It could also make more games come out with mod tools instead of DLC and more modding potential to any game is only a good thing in my eyes
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In these cases there should be an option of giving the producers some solatium for their effort if only to say "thanks" for the hard slog. And of course these mods also serve to let young lads try something practical in game design - who knows it might encourage the next batch of designers.
I have more or less stayed far away from this whole "scandal" because I know what the internet is comprised of, and I have no interest in participating in a witch hunt or defending fellow modders against one. Something I will say however, something I have learned in my 10+ years of modding since Morrowind with my HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF UNIQUE DOWNLOADS is this:
THE DONATION IS A LIE.
In all that time, with all those downloads, care to guess how many donations I have ever received? TWO. Not two hundred, not two dozen. Just two. For a grand total of $13 dollars.
I have personally donated more than 5x that to fellow modders just in the past year, and that is while I struggle with financial trouble due to a crippling injury which has left me unable to drive or enjoy many of the activities I used to, and while I spend what free time I have still creating content for people making death threats against anyone suggesting that mod authors deserve a chance to make a little money on the side for their hard work.
Meanwhile, nobody bats an eye at the people on Twitch who basically strap a webcam to their face and spam their channel with constant solicitations, and get paid often hundreds of dollars a week just to sit there and PLAY a game.
Having seen how many selfish, hateful, entitled, spoiled children comprise this community, it is hard to justify continuing to put out quality material. Were it not for the few kind words and supportive individuals out there I would just give modding the big finger flip and do it for myself and close friends, and let the spoiled brats pirate whatever crap remains when all the talent gets fed up with their useless contribution of NOTHING.
Note I said "WHO I THINK DESERVE IT". Players can't donate to the creators of all the mods they use/enjoy so they have to prioritize and choose who they want to show their support for. Personally, not expecting/pushing people to give them money strikes me as an admirable quality (Forever Free).
So I'll use your mod, but I won't donate to you for the above reasons, just like I don't donate to the creators of most of the hundreds of mods I've used, and I'll continue to download to modders I feel deserve my septims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emW15aLYbp4
I thought modding was something we did to improve the game, and most of us shared our modding if someone happend to like the work we did.
Then again I never made mods for skyrim, mostly minor ones for Total War and Oblivion.
End of the day, modding has always been a hobby, or at least for me.
I will say that the foul language and death threats towards whom supports paid modding suprised me, I thought we the modding community were better than that.
Anyway, thats my 0.02$
To even make a living in the music buisness you need a record deal.
To even make a living in the Art world you need to start doing some free drafts for someone to notice you and value your art.
many MANY economics studies have gone into this, despite what you may believe, the carrot and stick method of motivation only works for mechanical and labor related activities, not cognitive ones. people perform worse if they're trying to be creative just for the sake of a possible prize at the end of their efforts
for more information on these sorts of studies watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
while i do think modders should get paid for their efforts, outright SALE of mods with minimal accountability is atrocious and destructive. with how incredibly interconnected and dependent mods are on each other, how many conflicts there are, and problems that may not become apparent until maybe weeks of play down the line, what are people to do if they find out a mod they paid for breaks their game and the refund grace period has expired, or the mod author has skipped out and isn't updating the mod anymore? this isn't entitlement, these are legitimate worries and problems with selling mods
thats not even getting into the following that has already happened:
1. taking an existing mod people have been enjoying for years for free and hiding it behind a paywall
2.deciding that your mod that is the backbone of hundreds of other mods should be sold(imagine a mod author having to tell their users that they now need need to buy a paid mod in order to use their free mod)
3. updating an existing free version of their mod with invasive popup advertisements that spam the users to buy the "premium" version at regular intervals
4. buggy poorly implemented models that don't even function properly if the character is the incorrect gender
users are just as entitled to get a fair deal and be treated with respect as modders are to be supported in their work, that's wholly different from so called "entitlement"
It's not ungrateful or cheap to want to not have to spend money on potentially hundreds of mods. If all mods were to become monetized--and that's certainly the fear--it would become infeasible to have different sets of mods for different playthroughs.
Second, many of us are not opposed to paying modders, we're opposed to paying *upfront* for a mod that may have unforeseen compatiblity issues.
Third, we're opposed to paying upfront for a product that may not be throughly playtested and is not backed up by a company intending to release future products. Despite all the talk, Valve hasn't turned modding into a career, they've turned the workshop into an Etsy for mods. Well, first off, I don't buy things off Etsy for just this reason--too big a risk. Second, with crafts at least what you see is what you get. With a mod, that's simply not true.
Fourth, it's about not wanting to pay for something, that (let's be honest) can be a huge hassle. I've spent more time trying to get this unbelievably unstable game to actually work than I have playing it. I've lost 3 play-throughs to unresolvable mod-induced crashes, and having played it with mods, I can't enjoy the game vanilla anymore. Now, I'm supposed to pay for that trouble? No thanks.
By the way, the reason people pay for crap DLC is that crap DLC is--by and large--is plug and play. If Bethseda put 25 or 50 or 100 of the most popular mods together, smoothed out the compatibility issues and sold it as a DLC that was guaranteed to make your game no less stable... I couldn't pay them fast enough. But that's not what they've done.
This isn't about us not wanting to pay, it's about us not being stupid with our money. The market valve's trying to create, the product they're trying to sell us, is one we have no interest in taking part in and no interest in buying. That's no more ungratefulness, than when don't buy any of the thousands of games that people poured their heart and soul into.