What are your thoughts on paid mods?

[Zed Clampet]

Ark Survival Ascended has paid mods, some of them have been bought millions of times. The highest one was 11.1 million times for a $5 mod. The highest number of downloads overall was over 20 million for a free mod, but there were a number of paid mods with over a million downloads.

Needless to say, modding can be very profitable, which ties into a current PCG article:

HipHopGamer says GTA 6's user-generated content 'will produce millionaires'

HHG also teased "a small exclusive" about a GTA 6 side mission.

www.pcgamer.com

Thoughts?

 

[Zloth]

Mixed.

Plus: people on average will work a lot harder on a mod if they are going to get paid for it. You could even get companies that work exclusively on modding games!

Minus: people are going to be far less willing to share. Using somebody else's paid mod in your paid mod is going to mean payment agreements, contracts, and so on. It can even mean lawsuits over who stole who's code. (Spoiler: they both got it from a third person via AI training data.)

Minus: you want to use Star Wars ships in your free mod, fine, have fun. In your paid mod? Hell no. Cough up the cash. (Could this splash over into IP owners blocking even free mods just to make things clearer for lawyers' cases?)

??: deals may or may not show up between modders and developers to allow exclusive access to some modding capabilities. I don't even know which side would be paying the other, but I would guess the bigger studio would get paid by the smaller.

??: games can be pretty bad when it comes to access for people with various disabilities. Even something as small as red/green colorblindness can block people. Devs often don't know how to deal with that stuff and don't know if they will lose money taking the extra time to allow for it. A modding company specializing in that sort of thing would, though. They could open access to a lot of games for a lot of people - but it will cost the people wanting to play the game to do so. (Translations will fit in here, too.)

 

[Zed Clampet]

??: games can be pretty bad when it comes to access for people with various disabilities. Even something as small as red/green colorblindness can block people. Devs often don't know how to deal with that stuff and don't know if they will lose money taking the extra time to allow for it. A modding company specializing in that sort of thing would, though. They could open access to a lot of games for a lot of people - but it will cost the people wanting to play the game to do so. (Translations will fit in here, too.)

I would say making people with disabilities pay extra for accessibility features would go over very poorly.

One of my biggest concerns is that many mods don't stay updated. If you are charging someone for a mod, you better be willing to keep it up-to-date.

With Ark, most mods are still free, so that's good.

 

[Pifanjr]

It's already rare for me to use free mods or official DLC, so I don't see myself ever using a paid mod.

I have some very strong doubts on whether paid mods would actually deliver a better quality product than a free mod. I suspect a lot of paid mods will be made by people trying to make a quick buck with AI-assisted coding.

However, I'm not against the idea in principle, there are a lot of mod developers who have put crazy amounts of time and effort into their mods and I wouldn't fault them for asking for compensation for their work. I'm just worried how it'll affect the incentives for making mods.

 

[Rolfil]

You might get more people working on mods. But then you might get a ton of rubbish, low priced mods. Trying to separate the good from the bad? That's hard enough just with the flood of games on steam. This is just going to make it worse.

However the people that make really good mods, that stand out from the crowd are going to be able to fund themselves through this model.

 

[Frindis]

I'm against paid mods, but I am all for developers or other people setting up modding competitions or just a hall of fame, maybe an in-game salute to those who went the extra mile to make the community have more options for having fun.

 

[Colif]

I'm against paid mods

Future are happy to hear that lol. They are as well. 😀

back on topic.... never paid for a mod, I would only do so if I really liked the game and the mod added more life to it... like most of the free ones I used on Torchlight 2. They added more to everything to make game more interesting after playing it for many years.
I may buy DLC if it adds more to game than just a few items. Grim Dawn expansions generally add enough to warrant payment.

 

[mjs warlord]

Hello to you all .. @Zed Clampet said .... One of my biggest concerns is that many mods don't stay updated. If you are charging someone for a mod, you better be willing to keep it up-to-date.

The main problem is that a game gets updated which causes the mods you have to do all sorts of bad things and you cant blame the mod makers because they probably wont even know the main game has been updated but by that time its too late new game update plus outdated mods equells disaster...

Take my go to game SATISFACTORY ... in my first playthrough i used 100 plus milestones and when update 6 arrived it killed everything i had done with the mod so started a fresh playtthrough , some user say its possible to stop an updated satisfactory killing your mods but they will never tell you how to do it.

On the satisfactory Q & A page if you say ... can i get a mod to do xyz then somebody will help you , BUT , if you say a mod has killed your game they say tough cookie your choice , your problem. DONT even thing of asking for mod help on their steam pages cos they are 2 faced. Talk about mods and they will abuse you and then later on the very same people can be seen disgussing mods ??

 

[Frindis]

I may buy DLC if it adds more to game than just a few items. Grim Dawn expansions generally add enough to warrant payment.

Over 3.4K people are playing Grim Dawn on Steam right now. Then add that with GOG and Xbox players, I'd say the game is very good for its age.

Hello to you all .. @Zed Clampet said .... One of my biggest concerns is that many mods don't stay updated. If you are charging someone for a mod, you better be willing to keep it up-to-date.

Good point!

 

[Zed Clampet]

Hello to you all .. @Zed Clampet said .... One of my biggest concerns is that many mods don't stay updated. If you are charging someone for a mod, you better be willing to keep it up-to-date.

The main problem is that a game gets updated which causes the mods you have to do all sorts of bad things and you cant blame the mod makers because they probably wont even know the main game has been updated but by that time its too late new game update plus outdated mods equells disaster...

Take my go to game SATISFACTORY ... in my first playthrough i used 100 plus milestones and when update 6 arrived it killed everything i had done with the mod so started a fresh playtthrough , some user say its possible to stop an updated satisfactory killing your mods but they will never tell you how to do it.

On the satisfactory Q & A page if you say ... can i get a mod to do xyz then somebody will help you , BUT , if you say a mod has killed your game they say tough cookie your choice , your problem. DONT even thing of asking for mod help on their steam pages cos they are 2 faced. Talk about mods and they will abuse you and then later on the very same people can be seen disgussing mods ??

Mods are always used at the player's own risk. There are about 1400 mods for Satisfactory. That would be impossible for the dev team to take charge of, so it's up to the modders to keep everything updated and working. For playing how you play (one start game played forever), adding mods is a huge risk. For how I play (start a new game frequently), it's not really a big deal. For you, even without mods, I'd have many extra copies of old save files just in case something bad happens.

 

[Colif]

Only way I can play Grim Dawn now would be to brutally delete some of my characters as I have too many lol.

Maybe in a few years I will. Wonder if they fixed how street lights animated on AMD GPU yet.

 

[Johnway]

TLDR: it depends on the following for me:

- What is the content
- Quality of content
- How much i'm being charged
- ongoing support etc.




its a very slippery slope and one that i rarely engage with. Whilst i agree that Modders should, in theory, be entitled to some reward for their work, its questionable how much and whether the work they provided are justifiably worth charging for.

A good example of this was Final Doom, as a free mod it was shaping up to be quite good but when they decided to sell it, it did leave a nasty taste in everybody's mouth. i play a lot of Doom wads and i love them, but would i have the same opinion if i had to pay to play them? Probably not. i would probably take a much harsher tone even for some of the cacoaward winning ones.

what about personal radio stations or music? i can get behind that for some reason. But QOL mods and additional map packs probably less so. But Total conversions like selaco, smoking aces or supplice? HUGE mods like Fallout london? i might be convinced with the right price...

part of the problem is that its more wildwest when it comes to quality control and commitment. Its like the Steam greenlight situation, sell a promising yet half baked mod and there's no guarantee they will fix/complete it.

The other problem? abuse. Someone could quite easily take a passion project, combine it with someone else's or their own and sell it. Legally speaking it gets messy. We call it plagiarism, but what if you made your mod open source and free to play and then someone takes the same tools and locks their version of it? What if i make a free version of that under mining that person's mod? We would have modding wars and communities torn asunder.

The whole thing with the bethesda studio is a prime example of the mess when it happens and corporations get involved as well. i think the most reasonable thing is donations. Some token reward for a passion project, but those who want to make a living doing something they love might not like it.