I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Gabe had no idea that this was happening. Lol.

CLgaming wrote:Seriously though, optional donate button. Now.

I highly doubt the lack of a donate button was preventing anyone from donating to mod devs beforehand, nor should it now.

Call me an asshole, but if you've never donated to any of the mod devs in question, I don't believe you have any moral standing with this argument. I'm willing to bet most people never considered donating shit before this fiasco went down. Am I projecting? Perhaps, but I've rarely seen a viable financial model based solely off of donations outside of crowdfunding.

D-9999 wrote:I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Gabe had no idea that this was happening. Lol.

^^^this^^^

CLgaming wrote:Re: Lord gaben allows creationists to charge for rubber duck

I'm done. Get me out.

If people start charging for Garry's Mods addons im done

The Radical Larry wrote:If people start charging for Garry's Mods addons im done

If people start charging for Garry's Mod im done

Hakkla wrote:

The Radical Larry wrote:If people start charging for Garry's Mods addons im done

If people start charging for Garry's Mod im done

HYE IMA SEL ME PENY OC 4 $19.99 CU|z I WORKD REEL HRD ON IRT I SWER ITS NOAT A SHITTY MSPAINT RESKIN!!!!!!111

Just for my two cents as a modder for the past four or so years, mods should only cost anything if they are- ironically- not modifications but a whole new thing. For example, Cry of Fear, Team Fortress, Defence of the Ancients, Killing Floor. These things are all mods, but beyond their namesake of "modification". And it is worth mentioning that all four of my examples started free of charge, with three of them still being free of charge to this day, and their sequels being charged for or having some sort of income with them (save Cry of Fear, which is has donations/contributions). You could say that the mods were "tryouts" or experiments, and allowed the developers to get a sense of what people wanted when they made it bigger and better.

On the other hand, I saw a staff for Skyrim on the workshop costing £0.69. A staff. For comparison, you can get Binding of Isaac for that much at times.

The modding community has always been the same without getting stale: on the low end of the spectrum were resource modifications (texture packs, model replacements, etc.); in the middle were addons or modifications to code as well as resources; and right on the top of the spectrum were total conversions à la Team Fortress, Killing Floor or Cry of Fear. However, these all were judged by their quality through gameplay. That is to say, not all resource mods sucked, and not all total conversions rocked, and you played the mod to find out. If the mod costs £5, who the fuck is going to bother? Move on, and find another mod is what they'll do.

It cannot be denied that there are special cases in which this money-4-mods thing could work. GameMaker on Steam uses Workshop to distribute indie games. Monetize that and it would actually be quite good; a cheap Greenlight for GM devs. But allowing anyone to upload any mod for Skyrim and charge whatever for it is bollocks.

Conclusion? Mods on PC were fine as they were. Skyrim mods? Nexus. Saints Row mods? Saints Row Mods dot com. Free of charge. The monetization of mods is a risky move, which could work with some refinement, but the current implementation is crap. What they need is a curator system like Greenlight but for mods. Upvote mods that you would be willing to charge for, and the most upvoted ones get curated by an official, who then gives the all-clear to allow it to be sold. The Greenlight-like system could be elected to be on or off at the developer/publisher's discretion, in the case of GameMaker or similar.

And just for the record, I do not intend to ever monetize any of my mods. If I made a mod that eventually got to the point where I could say "I should sell this", it doesn't belong on the Workshop; it belongs on the store.

tl;dr: Paid mods are not bad in 100% of situations, because there are situations where it makes sense. Most of the time though, including in this current form, it's terrible.

(sorry if this post makes little sense- I'm very tired)

InnocentSam wrote:-post-

That... actually makes sense. I didn't even know Killing Floor was a mod to begin with.

Well done, Sam. These kinds of posts are a diamond in the rough among the all the negativity and yonzo that usually plagues these forums. This would also help to explain why Black Mesa is getting a commercial release.

They really do need to improve on this idea somewhat. Optional donations for most and selling mods that deserve the sellening. Gaben would be proud.

CLgaming wrote:This would also help to explain why Black Mesa is getting a commercial release.

Black Mesa isn't a mod. If it was then by that logic CB is a mod of Blitz3D.

On the topic of the whole paying for mods stuff, I don't really see it as that bad of a system. Even though it definitely has its problem it at least looks like Valve tried to put some effort into making it a decent system (especially with the refund policy).

However, I do think that there are two major problems with the system as it currently stands. The first one being the fact that the actual mod maker only gets 25% of the revenue while the publisher of the game gets the rest. Am I the only who thinks that this makes the idea seem like a money-grabbing system? It sounds more like a way for devs to make money off the work of others. The whole selling point of this idea was that mod makers could potentially be able to make mods as more then just a hobby and as an actual job, but I don't really see that happening if let's say, a mod maker only gets $250 for every $1000 made.

And now onto the second problem with this system, doesn't it seem incredibly exploitable? I mean, it's not like you need the workshop to install mods to Steam, so what's stopping someone from pulling the mod's files from their game and putting it online for free? Unless they give every paid mod some special randomized activation key every time, it sounds like the system could break very quickly. I'd on' actually know if there's a system to prevent this already put in, as I do not own Skyrim on the PC, but if there is then please correct me on this.

As Sam said, it's not a completly broken system, but it definitely needs some refinement. Otherwise this is gonna end up like the whole Greenlight launch catastrophe.