@cairnsythebeard: I agree with you OP in that setting expectations or requirements on the modding community only serves to hinder its progress. It may look great from a business perspective, but business usually crushes creativity, asks it to work 30 more hours a week, and sends it home crying as a lifeless husk of what it once was. God I hate my job.

@ballsleon: Right, mods are mods because they are the uncurated spurts of passion from a dedicated community that is working only because they want to.

If someone spends a long time making a mod, and it's wildly popular, to the extent that it encourages people to buy the base game when they otherwise might not have, I think they would deserve some financial benefit from it.

"No they don't. The modding scenes for games like Skyrim are flourishing and beautiful without any forced, paid content, so no offence to developers who haven't the time or money to create a great mod but there are armies of modders willing to do what you won't for free, with some exceptions, of course."

They way you say it makes me formulate it like: "We don't have to spend time and money giving the community mod support, the community will do the work for us anyway." I think it's more the opposite of what you're saying. Many (most?) very popular games have no mod support and also no modding community. It's the games without mod support but with a vibrant modding community that the exceptions.

I disagree. If someone works for several hours on a quality mod, that is no different than them working on anything else. Why shouldn't it be held to the same standards as others? What makes mods so different? Tradition? Status quo?

Saying that they knew what they were getting into when they started making the mod is a cop out. So nobody should expect things to change? You call them passion projects, the "hobby" side of games, but can't that be true of game making period? Should a person making a game on the side as a hobby not be paid? Not sell it for a price of their choosing?

Honestly, I find your attitude barely any different from that guy recently who spoke about (like many before him) game developers needing to work for the "passion" of it, not for proper compensation and working conditions.

@strife777: What I'm saying is that when a piece of content requires payment, it is held to higher standards and in my eyes is no longer a mod because it's being sold to customers alongside professional content and should be treated the same. If a mod requires money, it's DLC. Also I completely disagree with that guy and the american work ethic in general. I'm not saying modders shouldn't ever get paid, i'm saying forced paynemt makes the standards the same as DLC, so a donation model might be better for mods.

Just feels a bit like dickering over semantics to me.

If it makes you feel better, we can just rename it from "paid mods" to "community created dlc", and I'd still be fine with it.

@turambar: Except the connotations are extremely different. DLC is expected to work out of the box and should be no less functional than official content. Paid mods couldn't work due to their open ended nature IMO.

What the fuck is "the american work ethic"?

This is exactly what this is. DLC is official content made by the developer of the game. It can be free or paid for. Mods are unofficial content made by fans of the game (or anyone who isn't the dev). They can also be free or paid for. Anything you pay for will naturally be held to a higher standard than something you got for free.

So to you, the distinction between a mod and dlc is the technical quality and polish of it?

@e30bmw: I mean the extreme focus on work hours and unpaid overtime, sometimes to the detriment of health, seeing ones family etc.

@turambar: In my opinion, if a customer is expected to pay for a piece of content, they should expect it to work no matter what (not have the problems bullet pointed above) whereas mods get off the hook because they are free, so there are no moral or legal issues... unless they become paid for only. Sorry if the post wan't clear enough.

Are mods free of legal and moral issues because they are free, or are they free because modders want to be free of moral or legal issues?

Why is it unthinkable that people can just raise their bar of expectations when it comes to mods unless the price point is at the core of a mod's identity?

I think the real problem is that for a paid mod storefront to work it would require a huge amount of actual effort/curation on the part of whoever was running it. Not to ensure quality/compatability for consumers (a "buyer beware" could do the job for that) - more to ensure a fair market for modders. Modders would need ways of asserting copyright on their work, getting duplicates taken down, and being able to control who uses their stuff with/without their permission. None of that's nearly so important when money's not involved. I wonder if the cost and effort of making a genuinely functional mod marketplace would outweigh the returns?

And that's setting aside the wishy-washy-but-still-compelling argument that turning modding into a commercial enterprise seems to fundamentally change the ethos of the thing. Donations to modders/projects seems a much more sensible way of going about it, but that's sidestepping one of the reasons Steam/Bethesda want to introduce paid mods in the first place. I imagine even fewer people would donate to modders if Steam and Bethesda each took a 10% cut of the donation.

@immortal_guy: Right, curating all of the Skyrim mods for example would require an unthinkable amount of work, and self curation is kind of against Valve's hands off approach. I do think having to pay for mods does change what they are though.

Yes, curation is the actual problem. Especially when you jump into an ocean of Skyrim mods on your proof of concept test. But that might be more of an issue with Valves approach than with the concept as a whole.

@efesell: Maybe you're right. Some kind of curation service could work (though i don't see it coming from Valve) but to some extent it will always go against the wild west of conflicting mods that is the nature of a traditional modding scene.

I think this is a pretty good argument that I haven't seen anyone else put up.

I imagine even fewer people would donate to modders if Steam and Bethesda each took a 10% cut of the donation.

That's true, but I think that approach - the whole "donation button but Steam and Bethesda get a cut" - simplifies this whole thing and makes way more sense. Steam and the publisher/dev get their cut of it, the mod makers get some money, and the internet has proven itself quite willing to donate to something they like. It won't happen, there's far too many people on both sides of the argument who refuse to accept it, but it's a great compromise as far as I'm concerned. I used SkyUI so much that, yeah, I'd throw some money that dev's way if there were an easy and secure way to do so.

I'm not really against the idea of paid mods in a vacuum, but when you start setting up mod marketplaces, you set up a massive shitshow of people stealing from other people, people putting up paid mods that sound great but don't work right, or maybe even something more malicious, like a paid mod that hides malware. There's no way that any company will cough up the money required to properly curate a sort of paid mod storefront, so all we really get is an app store full of copyright violations, and the only guarantee of quality we have are the poorly written comments.

And who really owns the copyright, anyway? If I make a sword for Skyrim and ask a dollar for it, do I own the copyright for that sword? What if someone takes that sword and releases a free version of it on the Nexus? Do I get to sue that person, or am I just shit out of luck as I watch the download counter on the Nexus go up while no one pays for my version on Steam?

Very good thoughts here. I'm all for people putting money value into what products and services they put out, but don't call it a game "mod".

This is pretty important dickering I'd argue. Like Cairnsy said, Valve and other devs make their workshop fronts very clear what's a mod and what is not. Some is simply extra content and other things actually modify the game.

You can call it what you want but there are connotations and cultural meanings to the words here.

@cairnsythebeard:

"You don't automatically deserve compensation for engaging in what is known as the "hobby" end of a particular activity."

If you believe your work is deserving of compensation, then you should be allowed to sell it. Whether anyone buys it is another matter, but is ultimately irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not people should be allowed to do the selling in the first place. As for peoples expectations? Considering the heaps of trash that Steam puts on its catalog on a daily basis, I don't think anyone would bat an eye at a few scummy modders trying to sell shoddy software. It would be par for the course.

I also couldn't care less if it's considered "modding" anymore. Who cares what name we give it?

Thanks for writing out your argument in such detail, though. I may vehemently disagree with big chunks of it, but it's nice to see someone go to the lengths you did to describe your position in your original post.

@relkin: By saying that, I meant that you know you're not getting much in the way of compensation when you decide to create a mod, its nature is that it is a free activity. Expecting compensation means that a whole heap of baggage will come with it that means that it must be treated the same as DLC, but that makes for a tricky situation for customers. This is why I think either a strict DLC style system or a full on optional donation would avoid the potential mess.

That statement implies the decision to create a DLC or a mod is done so at the beginning of the thing's creation, when the entire difference between the two I've gotten from posts in this thread has been "DLCs are of a quality that warrants money while mods are not", and that's hardly a clear delineation as well as one that can change at any time over the process of creation.

1. I'm not convinced there are.

2. The differences presented here have thus far seemed arbitrary and not that useful, with attention given to how mods and dlc are treated differently by the community, not the fundamental difference between mods and dlcs at their core. (A difference that I don't think exists.)

I think you're incorrect in pretty much every single way (and most of this is just arguing semantics) but other people here have already laid out what you're wrong about in better ways than I could've.

I have to be honest, I disagree with pretty much everything you're saying OP. I'd be inclined to disagree regardless of how the message was delivered, but the bluntness of some of your phrasing (i.e. "So some mods don't suit a paid model but some do, so don't those devs deserve compensation? No they don't.") makes me even less inclined to agree with your point of view. I'm sure you don't mean for it to come across as self-righteous or entitled, but it kinda does sound that way.

I think there is plenty of room for traditional forms of "free" modding (I use quotes around that word b/c I've always felt like it diminishes the value of the time investment in creating them) to continue to exist alongside some sort of paid mods system. The perfect way to handle and curate paid mods maybe hasn't been sorted out yet, but I think it's both possible and necessary if games want to support extremely elaborate mods like some of those seen in Skyrim. The amount of effort to create those sorts of mods is only going to go up as the fidelity and complexity of games continues to increase, and I think having an avenue for reputable responsible modders to get paid for their work could be a healthy thing for promoting good mods.

The way some modders are already getting significant support through avenues like Patreon shows that there is a willingness by some segment of mod users to financially support mod creation, so I would view the efforts of Valve and Bethesda as just an attempt to formalize and further legitimize those ventures.

@ajamafalous: @chaser324: My point was that if you're making a mod for free, then their isn't an expectation to be paid, but a better donation feature would help. Also that there probably wouldn't be as large a market for things like bug fixes and tweaks as content packs. I probably worded it incorrectly. I'm just trying to think of ways paid modding could work without detracting the things that make the communal modding thing good, and whilst protecting consumers from faulty products. I wrote this in about 30 mins, i'm not a writer, and it probably came across wrong, so, sorry.

@cairnsythebeard: I think one thing that stands better explanation from you is what do you mean by "communal modding".

Yeah, I disagree with everything here. It's wonderful that there are people willing to do stuff for free, but there's nothing wrong with a creator asking for compensation for their work, especially if the community is expecting a mod to continually updated.

@chaser324: yep

Good article, the major issue especially with games where many mods have a deep dependency trees (like Arma and Bethsda). Trying to navigate through that when some mods are paid and some aren't yet they all depend on each other would be a giagantic mess. Not to mention the extra weight that comes with selling anything, ensuring that there's enough support and protections for consumers, especially in a market sector where it's notoriously weak.

I completely disagree. The problem with introducing any kind of paid system into modding is you are significantly reducing, if not eliminating a group of people who would mod for free just because they are passionate about the game. Once you commidify mods, you are going to start seeing a shift into what kinds of mods people make, and how much effort they put forward when they mod. Whats the incentive for a modder to go above and beyond if they make the same money? What's to stop the modder from deciding to stop updating a mod when the money dries up? You're going to introduce a whole new class of modders that care about marketability of mods over the creativity, and I think overall that's a net negative for the community. Honestly, in a hypothetical paid mods situation, I don't see a benefit for anyone except the modders who charge money. It doesn't enrich the community at all because you'll have a percentage of people who mod just to make money. When money is your primary motivator, it changes your priorities.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the majority of the issues enumerated here not pointed to the concept of "paid mods" itself, but the implementation of the "paid mods" system as was rolled out with Skyrim, which was pulled back and admitted by Valve to have been a mistake months ago? I mean, what I'm getting is that "paid mods" can't exist, except in the ways in which they already do okay (TF2 and CS:GO, donation-ware style payments, Patreon subscriptions, etc.) I'm not confident that Valve and Bethesda can pull it off either, but I'm not convinced that a per-mod payment model is not possible.

And honestly we're kind of using terms like "mod" and "DLC" rather loosely here. A content mod can more easily be classified as a DLC for the sake of an argument, because it's content and it's downloadable.