Its sad that only a small proportion of the User base ever looked at this video,

"An in-depth conversation about the modding scene [strong language]" by TotalBiscuit, The Cynacal Brit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aavBAplp5A

Are you really really really sure that everyone is for free mods?

Totally 100% sure?

No one here has yet to prove to me that we actually should get mods 100% free or otherwise.

Not one of you has made an effort to condone your behavior either in regards to how you speak of mod authors, which is loathing really its just aweful hate mongering when you get down to it.

Have any of you read what you wrote and then imagined giving 3 months of your life to create toys and give them out to the world for free.

How many of you have even done that?

Woke up and spent every minute of every day for 2-3 months straight on a mod?

How many?

Mod Authors and Mod Users are different people.

All I've seen is people going to great lengths to prove how entitled they are to free mods. Willing to throw people all into the same bracket with blanket statements about mods. How many of you would be willing to throw me physically under a bus for free mods?

________________________________________

Have any of you even thought about how sick of seeing these threads that we mod authors are?

We give our all to get noticed by companies like BSG and here we are we would have had an opportunity to potentially reap some reward from our efforts.

But hey here almost a whole year later gotta read some thread where the mod author bashing just wow its so out of hand and everywhere.

These threads only make sick those mod creators that want to be paid. I still believe that most do not want to paid nor do they expect it. They mod for fun and they share it because they can. Some people are just that way. It isn't always hunting the mighty dollar that drives people. For you to think otherwise says a whole lot about ... you.

A few posts have been deleted.

Whether you would like to see a way for mod authors to earn money, or prefer that all the mods remain free, there is a way to discuss this topic without resorting to personal attacks against those who have a different point of view.

I think it's abundantly clear that not everyone is for free mods based on your posts. Lol

By your logic of giving months time for a mod means you should be paid I guess I should be paid for the amount of time and effort I put into playing video games. Since almost every day off I have a wake up and play games until I go to bed.

Time and effort don't mean you get paid just means you take pride in what you do. There's nothing wrong with taking a bit of pride in what you do. Just don't go thinking payment for your work is required because of said pride.

Mods please delete, Double post!

I would never pay for mods, cept for the ones that a developer and their team worked on, beta tested, Q&A'd, marketed, and sold through various distribution avanues...

I have...For Oblivion alone I have 3 landmasses and dozens of multi-teired dungeons that took me literally thousands of hours to never release because I have yet to complete them...Hell, I even had a years worth of RP2k games that resided on my Maxtor HDD that died 10 yrs ago...So yeah, if I was getting paid for my mods, I'd still be broke as I've yet to release even one!

If you followed the link I posted and watched the video you would know that two of the biggest names in modding

Robin Scott aka Darkone owner of the Nexus and Nick McCaskey the developer of popular mod SMIM both are Pro-Mods.

Funny how their reputation is intact and after such strong statements.

There is, of course, the middle ground, where some people are perfectly happy to make mods purely as a hobby and to share what they make (small or large, low quality or high) for free, while other people sell the mods they make (a bit like an artist selling the paintings that they would have painted anyway).

And, the real thing is, neither group needs to regard the other with contempt or disapproval.

For instance, I've made some technically difficult mods, though unpolished and unfinished. The permissions for these on Nexus (unless I've overlooked one ) is that people can use these for whatever, however, and I don't expect them to ask for permission or give me credit. And, as can be seen from my posts in this thread, I've no problem with people selling mods, so long as the system is set up right.

We're not sheep. People don't have to do the same as other people. So long as modders' work is respected, why should they object if someone is selling mods? Or object if someone is giving mods away for free? Different communities (commercial mods and free mods) could co-exist without one poisoning or tainting the other, and some modders could be members of both. It would just need a bit of maturity.

[edited as I realised it wasn't really a reply to the post I had quoted - apologies for any misunderstanding]

gotta love that capitalism trying to ruin everything that was ever good in the world

Given the complexity of games and modding these days, I think we can see mods eventually coming at a price. The only ones who should have a say in this are the modders themselves. They are the ones taking their time to make these mods, and I wont doubt that there will be a time in which modders will want more than just donations for their work. If a modder is willing to give their work out for free so be it, but when a modder starts asking for money to use the mod, not one person should be able to tell them its wrong. But knowing gamers and how entitled some feel, i know their will be people making those modders out as the anti-christ amoung other things.

Of course if we do ever hit a stage in which we pay for mods, I would assume we get a finished and functioning product at the end. But thats a whole discussion in itself.

But if a modder wants money for their product, who are you to say otherwise?

Another reason why I would never pay for a mod is that I despise microtransactions. I hate them. I have no problem with paying $40 to $60 for a full blown expansion because it's in one lump sum, but this two dollars here and four dollars there can go hang.

And expansions are made and tested by the parent company.

So, still no to paid mods.

One thing I would like to add, is that I truly appreciate all the hard work and time that modders do. I really do. Please don't think I'm being hatefful for not agreeing with paid mods because I'm not.

Silly me. I always thought mods were made by fans of a particular game, as a hobby in their spare time, to improve/change the game as they see fit. That others enjoy/appreciate your mod is a bonus. If you are into modding for either fame or $$, then you are in it for the wrong reasons.

First off: Payed mods was a pure grab by Bethesda than any real effort to try to get mod maker money for there creations.

It was painfully obvious from the start that the first, last and literally ONLY thing on there mind was "How can we monitize This!!! seriously With Over One Billion One Hundred Fourty Two Millon Mods Downloaded from Nexus ALONE,

for that mater they could have pocketed 10-20 million just from the USP and saved themselves the effort and expense of actualy Doing QA work. hell I half wonder sometimes if what they mean by "Overhauling their GA and patching they basically mean "We give up and were just going to let the fans do it."

Seriously its BLATANTLY obvious that literally the ONE and ONLY thing on there mind when they decided to drop Payed mods on everyone was MONEYMONEYMONEYMONEYMONEY! because anyone who gave it even a Microseconds thought would have realised that this would have issues with people taking other peoples stuff and literally stealing it. they did not even try to talk with anyone in the mod community before dropping it because they realized that they had a [censored]load of issues here.

for one thing some of the mod creators are MINORS. that brings up a whole slue of interesting Child welfare and child labor law issues that any competent legal counsel would be pulling their hair out over. (the [censored]storm that hit building security and maintenance because someone brought there 15 year old kid in with them and the kid was helping mom clean for about an hour before someone noticed and called it in (by the way 3 people lost there jobs over it, but not the mom who was told that yes the kid could wait in the break rooms or "cafeteria" (It has a pair of TVs and the side room is basically a daycare)

Second a lot of mods have Items in them from other mods or mod asset packs where the original mod makers specifically gave free use to people to use so long as they did not charge for the content. (I suspect going forward you will see more items that have that kind of restriction)

you know. a game development company

I find it funny that people keep pushing this notion when even the guys who make the unofficial patches think its a load.

Two things
1. Its impossible to steal another modders work, because, as per the EULA of the creation kit, everything made with it belongs to Bethesda by default.
2. They actually let around 70 high profile modders, including Arthmoor, the guy who leads the unofficial path project for TES games, test the system before it was released, and they were all pretty fine with it. They weren't even held under an NDA to not speak of it.

If it was a problem it would have come up in games like CS, and TF2, which have allowed people to sell stuff, even stuff made by minors, for some time. But it hasn't, because its not considered a job, or doing someone's job like in your example.

Modding and selling stuff online isn't a job, nor is it classified as work, and thus child welfare and labor laws have nothing to do with it.

I prefer mods to remain free.

I fear that when money gets involved it would really hurt modding. People would steal eachothers work, so there needs to be an extensive system to protect the true authors.

Modding is often a work of collaboration, mods don't just build upon the game but also on other mods that came before. Just look at some of the popular mods in Skyrim, they have a Credits list half a page long. But if someone else is going to monetize their mods then other modders might suddenly not like the idea that this person is using (parts) of their mod. Something we already saw during the Skyrim fiasco! This could damage innovation and quality in mods as well as limit the modding potential as modders are less inclined to allow others to borrow their work or work together.

And then of course there is all the copyrighted material. Currently a company like Blizzard isn't going to care if someone makes a set of armor based on the Lichking as well as a Frostmourne weapon, two very iconic things from Warcraft. But if that person then starts charging money for what is essentially Blizzards intelectual property, they suddenly might crack down.

Modding is in this grey area and is (mostly) left alone because there is no money involved in it, but if it is then i can imagine a lot of things suddenly being "off limits" because the companies that hold the rights to that intelectual property want a cut of the action as well.

Then of course there is the consumer. What guarentee does the consumer have the mod will work in the future? What if things the mod depends on (i.e. other mod products or Archive Inval.) don't play nice with the mod you bought? What if the game it's gets patched and the mod breaks? What if the mod breaks on DLC? Or just... breaks?

What recourse does the consumer have? We saw during the fiasco that ths recourse was incredibly limited. You have a short while to test and get a refund if it didn't work. But beyond that you are on your own, and all you can do is politely ask the mod author to fix the mod and hope he or she does.

I'm not averse to mod authors getting something for their work, but in the form of tips and donations. Because i fear a fully blown "market" for mods will do it more harm than good.

good point. Dont think about that.

Paying for mods = Communism.
Free mods = Liberty Prime.

It's not that I don't think modders should get paid, especially the ones that are really good and put in tons of work, but the traditional model to pay for a mod upfront, like DLC, before even using it just doesn't work with mods. Even with a 24 hour refund period, often it takes a couple hours just to get a mod running with a bunch of other mods, due to installation issues. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to know whether or not a mod is to your tastes, or well-balanced, or.. well, there are a lot of factors you just can't know ahead of time when you're blindly buying a mod. Further, there's the morass of legal issues that could arise due to copyright issues, mods using code from other mods, mods being outright stolen and uploaded for sale... it's a hot mess, and best avoided by Bethesda, in my opinion.

It goes perfectly for humans, who have evolved to be selfish and greedy.
Communism works great for ants and bees, but not so much for humans, who are selfish and greedy

They already tried that with skyrim on steam and it nearly killed the community, if they tried to do that again I can say this game would be pretty much dead.

Just on this one point, minors really shouldn't even be playing Skyrim, let alone Fallout, because of the age rating on the games. But setting that aside, just have a requirement that anyone who wants to sell a mod provide some suitable evidence that they are advlt. If minors have been given access to the game by a parent, and have created mods for it, then they can distribute their mods for free just like all the modders who don't want to get into paid-for mods.

I would be interested to know what US consumer protection law has to say about faulty software. Can a 24 hour refund period be legally enforced? In the UK, as of 01/10/15, the period for a retailer giving a repair or refund on a piece of faulty software is 30 days.

And this would be a significant problem, as I highlighted in an earlier post, if anyone distributing paid-for mods tried to impose unlawful restrictions on returns - on of the issues that would have to be addressed before something like this could even be considered for future games.

As for a mod not being to your taste... well, I'm afraid that would be down to the buyer to read other customers comments and any reviews. Just like anything you buy, you need to be informed before you make a purchase decision.

This is one of the things that would be a real change, and was one of the things wrong with the failed paid-for mods fiasco. Valve and Bethesda didn't approach paid-for mods as commercial consumer products sourced from independent developers, even though that was exactly what they were. You can't just slap a price on something and then carry on as if there isn't a contract between supplier, retailer and consumer.

Optional donate button is fine. Charging for a mod is a big NO, in my world.

The only reason I don't want paid mods is a selfish one--I can't afford it. I pay $60 for the game and $30 for DLC, beyond that I can't spend money on video games. I wouldn't blame them one bit if modders/bethesda decided to go that direction, they work hard on their content, but it won't be from me I'm afraid.

Not all PC gamers who make mods want mods to be paid for and want all mods to remain 100% free forever.

I have been making mods for PC versions of video games since 1998 and I never want to earn any money from the mods ever. I'm ok with donations as a form of payment, but that's it.

It would seem that there are lots of people that think the time investment of getting proficiency in one program is the same as the time that it takes for 6 professional level programs that often require schooling, cost money, and require loads of free time.

Here's some more to think on, the amount of users back when it was Doom was what a quarter million at best?

Now we are looking at 20 million for one game. Next year it'll be 3 times that for one game.

The demand for more content is a never ending black hole it cannot ever be satisfied.

I get about 5 demands a week from people that want to break into the modding scene, they demand tuts, and videos.

I've gone as far as explaining the investment of time that it would require to make a decent armor replacer pack to a few people one of them sent back a letter filled with foul language and jealousy.

The fact of the matter is the barriers to getting a mod to be recognized as a great mod are huge, and yet soo many think its "easy".

The mod authors that got an article feature in major publications are completely different from your typical mod author, totally different leagues. Its a bit sickening to read "10 minute retexture" when the obvious implication is that the months and years of work of authors who have celebrity status are being demeaned.