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[wierd]

I said a $0 donation is insufficient to buy a latte. That does not make the mod worthless. By your logic, should someone steal or pirate something while simultaneously making a $0 donation (whatever the heck that is), they'd be stealing something worthless. Yet stealing implies wanting and want implies worth. That's a contradiction. Ergo, price paid or donated is not the same as value.

No. That is not what it means. You do not know the demographic split for reasons for using the store. As Putnam mentioned previously, one perfectly valid justification is simple enforcement of distribution control by the author, in the face of mod piracy by false sellers.

Anyone putting their mod up on Workshop for that reason alone would not then go and monetize their mod!

So, you are agreeing that you used a no true scottsman then?

That because I chose not to monetize, that my satisfaction with receiving zero dollars does not count, when you asked for just a single instance of a person who used the donation system (I chose to accept barter instead of money, in the form of mods that you rightly assert have value even with no monetary price-- and gladly accepted the donations that were provided to me) that was satisfied with it.

So, again-- am I not scottish enough?

[Leyic]

The Nexus donation system does not accept barter. Furthermore:

Show me one modder who is satisfied with the finances they've received via donations on Nexus or elsewhere. If donations are as great as you claim, it shouldn't be hard.

(Emphasis mine.) Mods are not finances! One can not receive nothing! If you're going to be pedantic, bother to make sure your interpretation of someone else's words makes sense!

What you are claiming is that the donation system should be satisfactory for everyone, not just those who refuse to monetize or receive any financial gift. As you are making the claim, the burden of proof is on you.

[wierd]

Which is moving the goal post.

Here is what you initially requested.

Can anyone here show at least one person who's said they were satisfied with the donations they receive through Nexus?

I received donated mods from Nexus.

You are saying this does not count, because you are moving the goal post, so that now it is this:

Show me one modder who is satisfied with the finances they've received via donations on Nexus or elsewhere. If donations are as great as you claim, it shouldn't be hard.

You then went on a tangent by highlighting the word finances. I am happy with the 0$ financing I recieved. That is the financial ammount I obtained through the donated mods on Nexus. I am happy with them.

Am I not scottish enough?

As far as I am able to determine, I meet the qualifications you have provided.

1) I am a modder
2) I am at least one person
3) I am happy with the financial amounts I have gained from my contributions on the Nexus. (My contributions were essential to EVERY SINGLE FONT MOD FOR THESE GAMES. Without my contribution, There simply would not BE any font mods, because the toolsets to create the font files would not exist, because NOBODY ELSE WANTED TO DO THE RESEARCH, BECAUSE IT WAS BORING. Note the linked archived page from the old forums. Note the title. That was NOT the first attempt I had made to recruit assistance. I was literally the ONLY person in the mod community that was passionately interested in breaking that format.)

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Leyic]

Show me one person who is not wierd who refers to mods uploaded to Nexus as "Donations".

I was referring to that button on Nexus that says "Donate" that allows one member to contribute money, not mods, to another member. Trying to redefine what "donation" means, especially given the context of this thread, is screwy at best, disingenuous at worst.

Furthermore, if all I needed was a modder who is at least one person who is happy with the financial amount gained through contributions on Nexus, I would have never asked your mutation of my question in the first place as I fit those criteria myself. Ergo I was not asking for people not wanting nor expecting financial donations in the first place.

[wierd]

Penguin-- Again, I have a PoS modified XBOX savegame mod floating around the internet with a cumulative download total that rivals those.

I am disapointed, because it did not live up to the purpose for which it was released.  Sure, it was proliferated very impressively, but did not do what I wanted it to do: Spur people to explore ESS files as a source of getting mods onto the XBOX version of morrowind without using modchips.

It was downloaded and proliferated, and rebadged, (and many other people tried to take credit for it, but somehow failed to replicate the process for some mysterious reason. (hmm, I wonder why..)) so may times that it is literally not possible to keep an accurate count-- sure. In that respect it was a major success--- but it was not really intended as a game cheat. It was a functional game cheat all right-- but it was a technology demonstration first and foremost, attempting to attract attention to what was POSSIBLE.  Nobody but me wanted to do that kind of modding though, and for that, I am deeply disappointed.

(In case you are curious, all you needed was Faren's enchanted editor, a hacked game controller (really, just solder a USB plug on an old XBOX controller, and load up the action replay drivers for it. Easy peasy. The action replay software will gladly tread the gamepad's memory card port like it was a real action replay, and let you get data on and off of it.) and a copy of XBOX-SAVE's XSAVESIG. You modify the savegame contents with the enchanted editor, recalculate the contents of vv.dat (the file containing the savegame's digital signature) with XSAVSIG, push it in with notepad, repackage the zip, and push it onto the memory card. Loads right up on the XBOX without any trouble. Since I pionered the process, I am intimately familiar with it. I was intially turned on to the prospect by learning that the "Doubling bug" happened on the XBOX. That meant that data in the savedgame was being treated like dirty mod data, which meant that the saved game could be hijacked to contain ESP data structures.  I did research, and sure enough-- IT COULD.)

What am I trying to tell you?  your argument is not really useful.  The number of downloads alone is not really indicative of value, or of quality.  My modified saved game is GARBAGE. TOTAL GARBAGE. All it does is add some super uber overpowered enchantments to the player's inventory, blast a bunch of GMST's with absurd game-breaking values (like setting sEnchantMult to 1 instead of .1, thus making EVERY enchantable item in the game have 10x the enchant capacity.) and force the game to redo the racemenu script because it is lacking variable data for script completion, causing the script to fire from the mainquest script.  oooh-- such premium mod offering there.  As I said, it was litterally a tech demo, that ALSO just so happened to be the most game breaking saved game out there.


Leyic-- No True Scottsman.  You are DOING IT AGAIN.  You will do this for ANY person who pipes up. You did it to Putnam earlier. Please accept that you have lost, and move on.

[Leyic]

The number of downloads alone is not really indicative of value.  My modified saved game is GARBAGE.

Leyic-- No True Scottsman.  You are DOING IT AGAIN.  You will do this for ANY person who pipes up. You did it to Putnam earlier. Please accept that you have lost, and move on.

You alone don't get to decide value for everyone, as value is an individual decision. Hence why aggregate demand is part of what determines price. If there are 100k people who found value in your mod, then there are 100k people who found value in your mod; you don't get to deny them that.

You can say "no true scottsman" all you like but that doesn't make it so. Just because you, I, Putnam, and others have no intention of monetizing our work doesn't mean we get to decide for every modder that they should be satisfied with the same. The donations system on Nexus was clearly established so that users could help modders financially. This is not debatable. Yet I have not heard of a single modder satisfied with what they have actually received through the system, aside from those who don't actually use the system in the first place. I asked for one such modder, no one has yet to present one.

[wierd]

That is NOT what you asked for.  you asked for a single modder who felt that way.  I provided you with that single modder. You rejected my testimony.

[Trapezohedron]

All I see are pointless debates being shunted around just to increase one opinion's value over the other.

And yes, I see goalposts being moved around.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[UXLZ]

You know, it was real difficult to sift through the shitstorm to find it but I did. The mod in question is Familiar Faces, a pretty ambitious mod that allows you to copy one player character and use them as an NPC in your other files. Here is the owner talking about it:

Yeah, I can agree with that. I think that guy probably deserves more money than he acquired through donations, and I'd be perfectly fine seeing that monetized in a vacuum, but sadly we aren't in a vacuum. Surely you can at least understand all the massive legal issues as it stands. If mods are going to be monetized, there needs to be a system significantly better than what Steam was doing.

[wierd]

Indeed.  The problem though, is that the necessity for attack lawyers is inexorably tied to direct-sale mods.

What you have proven penguin, is that modding with donation based financing is not viable. (as a source of reliable income)

What I have shown is that the kind of mod community we have is not possible with a direct pay system, because of the way the laws are.

The result of both of these things is that expecting to make a living making mods, AND expecting a thriving, easy to enter mod community to coexist, is a pipedream.

This leaves us with the intractatble problem:

Which is more valuable, and deserving of protection?
A robust (free) mod community OR A much more limited, Direct-paid system based mod community

[penguinofhonor]

.

[wierd]

Doing it with a new game wont keep the old modders out.

What will happen instead, is what happened with all the "Secret sauce" in the early morrowind days.
Initially, the modders asked Bethesda to release information about the NIF file format, for instance. Bethesda said that they could not do so, because of NDAs with Gamebryo, the company they licensed the NetImmerse engine from.  That's when NIFLA was founded, and the community reverse engineered the holy living shit out of the NetImmerse file formats.

If Bethesda tries this with a brand new game, a very large percentage of the old modder community will actively assault their new game, reverse engineer everything they need to make their own tools, Make those tools, then make free mods.

Bethesda will be forced to use the attack trained lawyers.

[Neonivek]

Let me see... The closest things I have to real life experiences with it was

1) a RPGmaker content site that once it started charging... basically everyone charged and thus made the site pretty much all but useless.

and

2) A audiofile site and HOLY COW was finding quality a nightmare with many music files being dreadful paid or not. Though generally speaking most people offered what they had for free until they had the clout to justify charging.

(There is also many Sim sites that charge... but how they work is they offered a lot of quality stuff for free and you could see everything you wanted to purchase with a system that wouldn't glitch because you used it.)

It is already possible for game developers to develop negative reviews of their games (They can't hide that they are there, but they can stop you from seeing them).

I am kind of curious what system would have to go in place to allow people to have open access to whether or not a mod is even worth it.

Who is going to front the money to "test" the mod for everyone? Who ensures the mod is functional when the game updates (as it is quite common for mods to break in newer versions)? Who says the mod is even worth it?

It had serious logistical issues.

It would have been a transition made on the backs of the consumer.

I certainly would never trust a pay for mod to work even a month later or even work on my machine... not even all the mount and blade mods work on my machine.

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But if you want to know what paid modding is like RPGMaker VX Ace offers some community mods as paid DLC.

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Look I won't lie... There is no part of paid for community made mods that sounds good to me.