Look, I just get really upset/triggered at the hoarding of things that are beneficial to society when they are shared freely.
Too many people wanting to charge 400$ for an epi-pen, not enough Jonas Salks. (and doubly so, when it costs 0$ to mass replicate the pen, like is the case with software, and art.)
Beneficial for society, not so much for content creators.
Mods are supposed to be made in people's spare time. For fun. Why would I pay for that?
"Supposed" by whom, exactly? That's just a tradition. Traditions can be changed.
Because of some hypothetical, made up situation where a mod maker wants to quit their day job, and then make a living making mods.
Because nothing takes the love out of something like doing it for money. Clearly.
Since when can't you do things both for love and for money at the same time? Haven't you noticed on what site we are?
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but, uh... quitting your day job to attempt to make a living making modifications for video games is... well, dumb as fuck.
EDIT: AND, it would be dumb as fuck, even if paid mods WERE a thing. That's not a career by any stretch.
A mod is just a less work-intensive DLC/expansion pack. There's certainly a big market for those. Modding is where a good portion of video game developers started out, too.
And it's only "dumb as fuck" because you're not used to it. Believe me, I too thought "dumb as fuck" when I've heard about people making a living off making YouTube videos, but that doesn't mean that those people don't actually exist.
Dude. There's 0% chance of modders turning a profit on which they can support themselves with paid mods. I mean... Impossible. Between gamedevs taking a massive chunk of your profits + low "sales" (in comparison to the kind of download rates we have now) + taxes = living under the poverty line for sure.
Again, people somehow can make a living off making YouTube videos. Do you think that big, popular, high-quality mods can't bring their creators anything more than a pittance? Especially if people can dedicate their time to them. You know, to produce them in a timely manner, and not the usual modding "eh, it'll be ready eventually, maybe three years if no one gets distracted by something else" manner?
That is where he is going. wierd's sarcasm physically hurts to look at, not sure how you missed it
The argument is that modders need to be paid for their work, both from gaben's own mouth and supporters of the idea around. But in reality modders will be paid a pittance while Valve and Bethesda reap even further profits from their insanely profitable IPs, which are almost better known for mods (and full games spun from mods) than for the vanilla game.
That's a problem not with paid modding itself, it's a problem with the apparently unbreakable monopoly that Steam holds over the PC video game market, and their ability, as a result of said monopoly, to set up bad rules for paid modding.
Have you ever made a mod, or are you talking out your ass?
I've been trying to be civil, but man is it hard when you're acting as if you're moralizing by saying that all the work I've done in my life is inherently worthless.
Besides that, there's some obvious holes in it. For example: Tetris is much, much less effort and coding than Fortbent is. Fortbent is a mod. Is Tetris not worth paying for?
Oh, and one other thing.
"Yo, we made this game, and here are the tools in case you guys get bored and wanna make something fun for each other cause you all paid for it. Peace."
Yes, your completely arbitrary definition is the entire basis of a wide variety of peoples' reasons for wanting to get into modding and anyone who doesn't agree with you is not a true modder.
I understand it as a fairly typical case of what's usually called "freeloaders". Namely, people who drastically under-appreciate other people's work and its value, because they haven't ever done so themselves.
Arguably--- There are clones of tetris on playstore for 0$.
For the record, I dont say that mod work is worthless. I just say that you get more return on your work by offering it for free, because you get the function and creative insight from other mod makers who do the same, and it is far more robust and healthy (all at once from a 'fun to do', 'friendly people who are willing to help for free', and 'people appreciate and like your work' set of perspectives) than a paid-mod based ecosystem would be, where other authors would tell you to get bent when you ask for help, or worse- steal your idea then demand you pay them for it.
And I say that this "community"'s robustness and healthiness is vastly overestimated, if going paid could make it instantly go to shit like that. People show their true colors when life-important stuff gets involved, you know. And you ignore the main point I've made - that paid mods allow for the possibility of carrying out modding full-time, increasing productivity of the highest-performing modders by several times more and giving them a straight-up career into game development.
That's something I need to point out - higher quality mods will naturally be bought more, which means that their creators can dedicate more time and effort to them, as well as buying other people's high-quality assets, resulting in an even higher quality mods. It's a positive feedback cycle, and the consumer profits from it by having a product of
vastly higher quality than what could be realistically achieved without paid mods.
Sure, there can be shitty implementations, and you can definitely argue against the ridiculous 75% cut that Steam imposes on people, abusing its inexplicable monopoly on digital distribution, but the idea itself is solid. It's the core reason why capitalism is the most successful economic system on Earth - because it naturally boosts best things to be even better.