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[Retropunch]

Unfortunately, this often boils down to people's perception of worth. Creative types (of which I'd class myself as one) cling on to the idea of 'intrinsic worth' - that somehow, them spending hours/months/years on something makes it somehow worthy of payment. However, other than to you personally, it only has the same amount of worth that other people perceive it to have. It's always been that way.

Modding has always been seen as a leisure activity/hobby - regardless of how hard you work on it, how many hours you put in, it's still seen as a leisure activity and therefore has little capital worth. It's like someone saying 'hey, pay me to play computer games because I'll try really hard and have a creative approach to it'. Just because you were creative and tried really hard, doesn't change the fact that it's seen as a leisure activity.

Yeah, you can argue that people should be paid for the effort they put into stuff, but that doesn't work - I can say I tried really, really hard to draw pages of smiley faces, but that doesn't change the fact that it's basically worthless to most people.

Even if valve tries to push forward paid modding, that's not going to change. Putting a price tag on stuff doesn't automatically shift people's opinion in that way (yes, it can influence people's perception of high priced goods, but not base worth).

I'm not saying it's 'right' just that it's a bit ridiculous for people to go into creative ventures that THEY KNOW are not well recompensed and then complain.


 

[andrea]

I have seen cheap light bulbs, But free ones are quite rare.

I must say that the hostility on this topic surprised me. From some posts, it seems that modders receiving any kind of compensation in any way would be a travesty so great that the modder should be lynched. ( mind you, I am convinced that even the most hostile people to pay mods consider stuff such as patreon fine; just it doesn't seem that way when I read stuff about mods having to be made of pure love, without taking any money).

But anyway, while I don't oppose paid mods I think any such market should be curated and moderated to avoid mod theft. As long as basic checks are done... well, it is going to be a change, and I am going to lose access(or pay) to mods that maybe I would have played. But I can definitely see why mods want to earn something out of their work.
I mean, if they really love modding , they may want to dedicate more time than their day job allows.

[Neonivek]

I have seen cheap light bulbs, But free ones are quite rare.

I must say that the hostility on this topic surprised me.

Well if you are in a paid gig like I am. This hostility is quite ordinary when something free is being charged and advertised. People have an inherent sense of time and place and changing that is rather difficult. In fact it is about the same response I got when I asked if I could advertise in a place that was free but hinted I could advertise there.

Remember there was nothing physically stopping people from paid mods until now except sort of legal grey zone. Steam is being used as a platform to sort of force the issue and make people accept it whether they like it or not.

Basically it is the same response Deviant Art of Fanfiction.net would get if they wanted to implement a paid service that is ever present and in your face. (and while YouTube has a paid service it is extremely on the side as to be unnoticeable... O_o)

So it isn't QUITE the "Why won't people understand our struggle!" that you are making it out to seem.

---

As well Modding has a VERY firm role in the gaming community. Paid mods is contradictory to that role. Notice how people's mods lists are often sizable and are often small UI fixes and graphical upgrades.

Paid mods completely change that dynamic... In fact it completely destroys that dynamic to the point where people can only speculate what will take its place... with the current aspect being: "Hey maybe someone will make mod packs, filled with a lot of paid mods"... But that only works if the overall price is low (which Microtransaction wise... No)

FINALLY there is also the fact that mods are notoriously temporary and exist only so far as the mod maker is willing to support it. Previously it is no big deal if a mod developer stops working on a project. Yet because there is no co-ordination between mod creator and the game developer it means any paid mod is basically in a point of hostility because they can stop development at anytime and take your money.

[Eagleon]

I'm not saying it's 'right' just that it's a bit ridiculous for people to go into creative ventures that THEY KNOW are not well recompensed and then complain.

So you are saying it's right. You think it's ridiculous, you support the idea that there's a special class of musicians and artists that should be paid for their work rather than having some steps up to that point for artists to scrape by on. See, you can't really hold yourself apart from the people that don't pay a reasonable sum for equivalent work (your smiley-face example doesn't hold - if you drew thousands of pages of smiley faces, you'd probably start to become an actual artist. Trust me.) and then simultaneously degrade the people that demand change.

It's always been that way.

No. I'm using music here, because that's my experience, but it's the same as art - in our culture, as in every culture, we pay people for certain types of performances. Bars, mostly, though orchestra work and royalty payments are also a small (and decaying) example. We reject other types of work because it doesn't fit our standard for meaningful labor. This is different for every single culture, but there are no cultures that don't pay musicians at all in some way. The music we pay for determines the music we have. You pay for mass-produced brostep, you get mass-produced brostep. The reason mods are an "inferior" product, something with less work and less value, is that we don't pay for mods. The fact that we have larger works such as games does not negate the possibility in our culture of providing compensation for smaller ones.

[Neonivek]

The reason mods are an "inferior" product, something with less work and less value, is that we don't pay for mods.

No, the reason they are an "Inferior product" has nothing to do with the fact that you pay for them. You could pump a trillion dollars into them and they will always be an inferior product.

They are so because they are an alternative to official DLC, official expansions, and official games.

Fanfiction is similar. Even when a piece of fanfiction is far superior to the original... It will always be an inferior product.

---

An inferior product is a cheaper alternative to an existing product that is typically of lower quality or expectantly... even if it isn't so.

Off brand Katchup, even if it is 100 times tastier then brand katchup, is an inferior product.

Likewise when brand katchup noticeably doesn't live up to a inferior product, it is considered at fault. (Triple A games get a bad wrap for a reason, even though they would be excellent as budget titles)

[Eagleon]

The reason mods are an "inferior" product, something with less work and less value, is that we don't pay for mods.

An inferior product is a cheaper alternative to an existing product that is typically of lower quality or expectantly... even if it isn't so.

Off brand Katchup, even if it is 100 times tastier then brand katchup, is an inferior product.

I get that. Would you say that it's impossible, though, for there to be "superior" (or whatever the terminology might be) products that support the work of something that makes much more? Because I would count the components of a game, its art, music, writing, code, etc. as an example from their individual perspectives. I would also count game engines - whether or not they make more money, the cost of producing them can fail to make up for the work and cost of labor put into them.

[Neonivek]

Hmmm going by the terminology a "Superior product" is typically a more expensive version of a product... often being a luxury (A car versus luxury car).

So can there be superior products of mods? So the expensive side of cheap?

Or wait are you supporting the current scalping model for paid mods?

[Eagleon]

The former. Scalping can easily be handled by moderation, as I've said. There's no reason but cultural momentum we can't choose to recognize the work people put into these projects as actual work, deserving of compensation and the benefits that compensation provides to the quality of that work. I would have absolutely paid for Enderal, in many ways it showed much more work done to parts of the game that Skyrim missed the mark on, and I'd like more of Enderal.

Remix culture shows the myth of derivatives being an inferior (common usage here) product. Recorded media completely changed what we can accomplish with art as well as music, there's no reason it shouldn't change games, and there's no reason we can't have a rational confrontation of the burden we place on people we expect to work for free. Economics doesn't account for everything here, it's certainly not the reason we don't just put people in shackles (at least not where we can see them.) There's a certain amount of personal responsibility I think we're actively evading.

[Neonivek]

Economics doesn't account for everything here, it's certainly not the reason we don't just put people in shackles

Economics wise slavery is a very poor business model and is one of the major reasons why the USA ended slavery.

For all its guff... The North was more inclined to abolish after it no longer strongly benefited from it anymore. Which kind of throws a curve ball into their moral superiority stance on the civil war.

So yes economics ended slavery too.

[Eagleon]

Economics doesn't account for everything here, it's certainly not the reason we don't just put people in shackles

Economics wise slavery is a very poor business model and is one of the major reasons why the USA ended slavery.

For all its guff... The North was more inclined to abolish after it no longer strongly benefited from it anymore. Which kind of throws a curve ball into their moral superiority stance on the civil war.

Yeah, but for a long time because of the growth represented by expanding trade, it was great for the people that had them. There were economic forces involved, but on an individual level, it's crazy to discount empathy when we could potentially just be treating people like cattle with hands and just wasting that much more out of pure laziness for an alternative. In a lot of ways we still do through our prisons and third-world labor. That's changing because people are pointing it out and fighting to make their conditions better, and yes, because it's unsustainable.

For recorded media, we have a problem of infinite growth. There appears to be no reason other than empathy to stop exploiting creatives, so I'm giving you a reason - if you don't support us, we will disappear. That sounds like apocalyptic posturing even to me, but consider that most musicians are completely unknown to you when you buy an album. There are dozens if not hundreds of songwriters, producers, audio engineers, and (though I'm ironically loathe to include them) people in distribution and marketing putting that album in your hands. When you get that album from a Youtube stream, you're paying a fraction of a penny to all of those people, probably only once. This beast is only going to get bigger until the bubble pops, and we're left with only folk. I mean that could be a good thing in some ways, but that doesn't make it any less of a loss of knowledge and skill, and it's completely unnecessary if we just gave way to more lower tiers for artists to occupy. It's completely up to us how we value these works.

[Neonivek]

if you don't support us, we will disappear.

I am not exactly saddened by the vetting process.

[Retropunch]

I'm not saying it's 'right' just that it's a bit ridiculous for people to go into creative ventures that THEY KNOW are not well recompensed and then complain.

So you are saying it's right. You think it's ridiculous, you support the idea that there's a special class of musicians and artists that should be paid for their work rather than having some steps up to that point for artists to scrape by on. See, you can't really hold yourself apart from the people that don't pay a reasonable sum for equivalent work (your smiley-face example doesn't hold - if you drew thousands of pages of smiley faces, you'd probably start to become an actual artist. Trust me.) and then simultaneously degrade the people that demand change.

No, if I drew a thousand smiley faces of just '' it wouldn't change it's worth at all. Again, it's the fallacy that time/effort/practice = worth something. Lets say if I drew the letter 'b' a hundred thousand times, it doesn't change that it's just writing a letter, and it's not worth anything to anyone. Would you pay for 15 pages of the letter b or is it not really worth anything to you? 

I don't hold that there are a special class of musicians/artists at all, as I said ALL artists are not paid what they believe they're worth. Ask anyone from the corner street busker to Metallica, and they'll all say the same thing. The problem is, that you don't get to choose what your stuff is worth, or say that it has any worth.

That's why jobs have salaries, and that on average, workers are paid a quarter of their worth to the company (at best). Creative people always feel that they are somehow different in not being paid fairly but it happens to everyone.

The issue people have with the paid modding is that valve are trying to turn something which is seen as a hobby and a 'well it's nice if someone does it, but I'm not that bothered' into a money grabbing corporate outlet. 

[Flying Dice]

More directly, it's just another iteration of the middleman scam, which is about as old as the concept of selling a thing. You've got a system where some people create things and others acquire the things. Both parties negotiate directly and generally reach an agreeable arrangement, even if that's a parting of ways. Then some enterprising capitalist encounters the system and realizes, "Hey, I can probably make a buck here!" They go to the creators and put together a really nice-sounding offer: they've got experience facilitating, networking, and marketing. Just give them a cut of the income and a little say in how the thing is made and they'll take care of all the back-end work while expanding the market; the creator will be free to do nothing but create!

Wait some time. The creator notices that they've gradually lost control over their creation, the middleman is reaping the lion's share of the benefits from the arrangement, and they can't even leave and start over-the middleman owns the idea of the thing and will come after them if they try! The user notices that the thing has become more and more expensive and tedious to acquire and use. Eventually, it becomes so bad that the thing is produced by a soulless complex independent of the original creator and the only users are those totally unaware of the original situation.

This is only new in the context of modding, it's an ancient technique for scumbags to make money and take over things that people like for the purpose of making additional money without contributing anything productive to the equation beyond their finely honed bullshit.

[Neonivek]

Well except Valve isn't bothering with this "Over time" crud.

Content creators already earn a small fraction of their own sales. "But don't worry, if you sell a million sales like that one person. You can earn a lot of money!"

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Here is a scenario in which I would be okay with paid modding:

In development--this parts important, a major reason why paid modding sucks is that they're just shoving it down our throats mid-way through the life of games. Which sucks, because you have to ask, "Why am I paying for this now, considering I didn't have to pay for it before?"--, the Devs say, "Listen, we're going to pay people on a work-for-hire basis to help us create new content, this content will be available to the users for a nominal fee." Or however you want to spin it. The point is, to piggyback off of Neonivek's "Inferior Product" idea, that if you can ensure a certain standard in quality, and a certain amount of content, and it's more integrated into the game development itself, then it would make more sense for people to support modders in that way.