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[Frumple]

Pretty sure that wasn't p being a dick. Might seem like that when you're the one who made the argument bad enough to de-convert someone, but it's not really how they're coming off.

But also, the effort that goes into bundling lots of small mods together to make a working, coherent mod pack isn't trivial either. Getting lots of mods to play well together in a way that makes sense, and isn't going to break the buyers machine, and now that person is responsible for customer support. Consider that ... it might not be as easy as it sounds to merely slap a pile of small mods together and call it a "pack" that you are now responsible for maintaining.

... well, one of the nicer things about mod efforts -- unofficial stuff not really covered by commercial contract in general, really -- is that responsibility is... very optional. Which is nice. Most of the stuff I've personally done in recent times were blatantly prefaced by, "I'm not going to support this, it's working for me, if it doesn't for you fix it yourself." It's significantly more difficult to do that when dosh is involved, ehehe. Isn't really an argument or anything against paid mods in general*, but it's certainly a reason why you don't want to actually get involved with them, heh.

Though that said, effort involved kludging together mods depends a lot on the base engine and how mod friendly it is. Sometimes it takes literally illegal reverse engineering, sometimes it takes basically nothing but stuffing a bunch of junk in one folder, or at most smoothing out a few names or whatev'. Modding environments et al can vary pretty drastically.

... all that also said, I will throw out that something like how ToME is working, I don't really mind. Advance/prototype material behind a paywall, with the promise it will eventually be let loose. Extra bonus being the code is still visible even without paying, it just doesn't unlock in game without it. That'd be pretty alright, too, some kind of mod support that makes it fairly easy to implement a check like that. One of the larger concerns I have about it all is paywalls blocking off particularly useful/insightful bits of coding or design, particularly from people with the enthusiasm to code but not the means to really pay for it, and something like that assuages that concern rather efectively. _{and there's all sorts of situations where someone can afford/has access to a computer and the base material, but no loose funds for anything else, to preempt the whole "If they can afford the game they can afford extra paywall" thing that likes to come out in response to that sort of statement}

*Already said I'm not conceptually opposed to them, I think. Modders want to paywall their stuff, if the base game devs give the okay then... okay. It's an incredibly shitty thing to do to all the other people working on modding, and there's less than zero chance I'd personally pay or otherwise support them, but okay. Just against it practically, since I haven't seen and can't really think of a setup where paywalling mod material would be a net benefit, given how modding works and how symbiotic/self-supporting the process is, at least at its best. Leaving the thing open but asking for donations is great, though. Folks just need to put a bit more effort into hashing out what the right balance between visibility and annoyance is.

[Reelya]

$20 for a mod!?!? That's probably not compatible with a bunch of other mods!?!? We'd be in the hundreds of dollars for games if we paid for all those big mods we like so much! That's wild!

But that's entirely posited on your semantic idea of what a single "mod" is, in the current ecosystem of free, and very small, mods. What Putnam described is more on the level of an entire expansion pack such as Morrowind's Tribunal, which people had no problem paying $20+ for when it came out. And people who are making a pack that they need to charge $20 to make the costs back, well they're going to take more care not to cause any incompatibilities, much more so than people making small free mods that are basically tweaks.

... 50 cents for a sword and a quest!?!? there are between 350-500 quests in vanilla Skyrim (found a couple of numbers), that's 12-17 cents a quest! And you want to charge me around four times that for a user-created one? That stuff adds up!

Companies sell about that much in a 50 cent DLC pack now. They charge that for a few cosmetic reskins etc. And again, that's dependent on what people want to pay, and on the amount of content that's in a 50 cent bonus quest. Remember, that will be competing with a whole lot of other 50 cent bonus quests that other creators are making. Over priced ones will drop out, and there are also steam reviews. Over time, people who make these quests will get reputation +/- and that will drive sales towards or away from other things they make.

Also, how are we to understand the quality of a mod? Can we have some sort of trial period first? Forget going on pure content, what about quality???

Is it really worth chasing a refund on 50 cents worth of DLC? How much is a minute of your time worth? And for a $20 expansion, well your odds are about the same as any expansion pack.

[Frumple]

Is it really worth chasing a refund on 50 cents worth of DLC?

Yes. Yes, it is. A single one is more questionable, but it's rarely a single one and 50 cents adds up quickly when there's a bunch of them.

The time bit is irrelevant; there's almost always time you can't otherwise spend on making money you can spend on getting a refund, at some point during a day (or week, or whatever).

[Flying Dice]

These aren't companies. They're individuals doing this for fun, for practice, for their own use. Microtransactions are already a cancerous growth on the industry, the shift from proper expansion packs into "pay $20 for a couple quests and items" is horrid, and player-made versions don't even come with the general assurance of compatibility with the base game and (other) mods. Especially when this is all being discussed largely in the context of Bethesda RPGs, games which are so notoriously broken and shitty by default that they're only considered complete by most people once the massive modding community has had a year or two to fix and expand them. If I paid an average of $2 for every Skyrim and FO4 mod I have currently installed, I'd have paid something in the range of $400. To make two games which already cost $60 + $40-60 of DLC worth playing.

If paid mods came through I just flat out wouldn't buy any games which rely heavily on mods for long-term enjoyment, because I'm unwilling on principle to pay literally hundreds of dollars for a single game. It's why I never bothered with any MMOs beyond Runescape and Guild Wars 2, and why I tend to avoid the yearly re-release genres. I've never pirated a game in my life (beyond emulating old GBA games), but if paid modding went through I would pirate games and mods that support it solely to help seed the downloads for other people because the whole scheme reeks of the worst excesses of the gaming industry.

[wierd]

Given the choice of paying 2$ for every mod I install (less than 6, usually), or making the changes myself, I would make them myself.

Already did that a few times. One I am considering doing is a realistic agricultural mod for skyrim.

[Reelya]

I think you've kind of hit on the line between worth paying for and not worth paying for.

If you're even thinking "I'd rather do that tweak myself", it's not the kind of thing that's a viable paid mod.

For example from my other example it would have to be "Meh, paying for Morrowind: Tribunal, I'll make my own version of Tribunal", which of course starts to sound silly.

[Frumple]

That's kinda' hilariously bad as a general heuristic, though. What "I'd rather do that tweak myself" entails depends tremendously on who the person saying it is, and there's a lot of DLC tier shit that can fall under that umbrella even for people significantly less capable.

[Putnam]

It's actually incredibly good as a simple heuristic for one reason--if that works for someone, that someone can put up their version for free.

[wierd]

Mostly, I just want simple fixes to petty annoyances, which is why my list of installed mods is so low. Some are mods I throw together myself to suit my own personal tastes, like adding a buttload of planters and fencing to say, the lakeview manor area to support my alchemy habit.

The "realistic agriculture" mod I have been contemplating undertaking would be a massive effort, that would attempt to address real issues with what I see in the Skyrim province for things like seasonal availability of food stuffs, actual carry capacity of the population presented (eg, realistically sized farms) and the like.  Would turn much of the barren whiterun hold tundra into carefully terraced cropland for things like cabbage.

I might consider releasing something like that.  Little things like "enable certain spell effects for enchanting", and the like that are just literally 5 minutes in the editor are not worth uploading to the nexus IMO, but then again, one of the mods I install is the "left hand rings pack" mod, which is basically just that.

[Sergarr]

-snip-

I'd rather of opinion that those "1 sword" mods should remain free. There's obviously some problems inherent in the whole "mutual mod capability" in Skyrim that result in nigh-unresolvable mod compatibility issues once their numbers gets too high. I expect that paid mods will be all basically expansion-pack material or at least approaching that. High quality, high content. Or maybe just sell them in pre-made packs/compilations of these "1 sword mods", expansion-pack-lite style.

I dunno, the whole idea of paying for a single item in a game that already has like hundreds of them in base variant seems like it'd be really hard to price fairly.

[wierd]

You guys are missing the point.

What the public feels the mods are worth is only half of the issue. The other is how much the mod maker wants to be paid, since THEY are the ones who will likely be setting the MSRP.

That means if they want to charge 2$ for a pretty sword with no other content, they set that price, and the only choice others have is to either buy it or not.

AND-- should somebody attempt to make a similar sword, and put it up for free, expect lots of wailing and vocal complaints.

[Sergarr]

You guys are missing the point.

What the public feels the mods are worth is only half of the issue. The other is how much the mod maker wants to be paid, since THEY are the ones who will likely be setting the MSRP.

That means if they want to charge 2$ for a pretty sword with no other content, they set that price, and the only choice others have is to either buy it or not.

AND-- should somebody attempt to make a similar sword, and put it up for free, expect lots of wailing and vocal complaints.

And then said person will be forever known as "that asshole who tried to sell a free-moddable sword for two bucks" and be ignored.

I mean, do you think that those kind of people somehow hold ultimate power over the entire community, or what?

[wierd]

If ENOUGH of them start trying, and raising a stink, it will push community outlook.  There is even science on just how many people it takes to do that.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/tipping_point.html

So no.  Most people are like me or Putnam, who would make something like that as a demo, or as a personal taste type mod-- and do not make a fuss about it when people dont use or download them if we make them available. (We make them available as an afterthought to making them for ourselves) However-- people with an inflated self ego *WILL*, and being the disproportionate voice, they WILL move the mainstream.

[palsch]

And then said person will be forever known as "that asshole who tried to sell a free-moddable sword for two bucks" and be ignored.

I mean, do you think that those kind of people somehow hold ultimate power over the entire community, or what?

The problem is the community who would be aware of the theft and raise a stink would only be a small part of the total community who use mods, especially if promoted through a platform like the Steam Workshop. The person who created it would still make money off it unless an actual takedown attempt was successful. Hell, many who enjoy such a mod would be offended if it was removed, being unaware of the free version. This is especially true if, as with the original attempt at paid mods, many mods are not on the Steam Workshop but instead on other platforms like Nexus. Casual players would never find the alternative.

It's still down to people who want to pay paying, so it's not necessarily exploitative of the end user (although an argument can be made it is exploiting their ignorance of the free option, or their laziness to use the easy platform rather than learning to use Nexus), but it offends the sensibility and community spirit of the modders, reducing the likelihood of people posting new mods. So long as the modder feels exploited or otherwise offended that is all you need to do harm to the modding scene.


FWIW, I think that developers can treat modders as recruitment pools for work-for-hire modelling/art works (as with the DBG Player Studio model I mentioned before) when games are funded by micro-transactions and otherwise unmodifiable without any of these conflicts. Similarly they should always consider modders as potential developers/designers (how any of Paradox's employees started that way now?), possibly bringing the mods into the game as official features at the same time. Of course, this depends on the development model of the game. Games that receive continuous development (frequent patches and a full dev team continuing work) are more likely to take this approach than those that are locked at release with only occasional DLC/expansions. Once there isn't a dev team to be hired into it's harder for the developer to reward the modders who keep the game interesting.

[Reelya]

Most people are like me or Putnam, who would make something like that as a demo, or as a personal taste type mod-- and do not make a fuss about it when people dont use or download them if we make them available. (We make them available as an afterthought to making them for ourselves) However-- people with an inflated self ego *WILL*, and being the disproportionate voice, they WILL move the mainstream.

So some people with an inflated ego make something and try and sell it and nobody buys it and they get angry ... exactly how is that behavior meant to change community opinion? I'm not seeing it myself.

It's still down to people who want to pay paying, so it's not necessarily exploitative of the end user (although an argument can be made it is exploiting their ignorance of the free option, or their laziness to use the easy platform rather than learning to use Nexus), but it offends the sensibility and community spirit of the modders, reducing the likelihood of people posting new mods. So long as the modder feels exploited or otherwise offended that is all you need to do harm to the modding scene.

I sort of think this type of thing would be much more prevalent at the start of the process, and like I said before the market can be proactively innoculated by community action. By turning your nose up at hosting the free mods on the paid site, you're basically giving that market to the cheats. It's like boycotting and election then getting outraged that the other party won. If you don't like paid mods, then saturate the market with the community-made stuff at the lowest possible price, while highlighting all contributions in big letters: and if you like paid mods that will only drive up the quality and increase standards.