That is not the same thing. DarkOne himself stated he was neutral in this whole thing and has made NUMEROUS posts on the nexus saying he is alright with the concept but doesn't want it for the Nexus. No one is putting anyone into "camps" they've already said their views on the matter numerous times.

Sounds more like he's advocating for choice to me.

There have also been some high profile modders who have made mods everyone has heard of with millions of independent downloads that have come out publicly against paid mods, saying modding should remain a hobby for fun.

People who try to make this a "mod user vs mod maker" debate are obfuscating the issues.

Yes, a choice to have paid mods, which will destroy the existing modding as Dark One says.

Per statements on reddit:

I know. I didn't feel like making a long list.

I just said the names of the modders who x_death said are pro-paid-mods, when in fact we are anti-paid-mods.

Did he say that? I don't recall that. Either way it will certainly change the landscape but I sincerely doubt it still destroy the current offerings or future free offerings.

By your own admission there are a great many people who are in favour of only free mods, so if they're going to continue in only a free landscape your current and future offerings are just fine, they're as safe as can be.

So you choose to ignore the fact that The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 paid mods destroyed the modding community?

sesom explained it. I never participated in that fiasco for The Sims, but I witnessed it in forums, etc.

Free mods going underground, etc. It was a disaster.

Missed my point entirely.

Some people in this thread, not you Cider!, are trying to put people into camps.

I was making an exaggerated statement for affect.

You clearly didn't read my whole post, where I clearly wrote "None of what I just wrote is true". Which, in a way, proves my point. Some are so dead set on making this a "with us or against us" type deal that they will take one thing someone says disregarding the rest if it doesn't serve their purpose. If you take in everything Brumbek said, he would come across as neutral, and I hate using that whole pro, anti, neutral thing.

Shifting the goal posts.

What happened with the sims was EA ignoring blatantly shady and in some cases outright fraudulent practices for long enough that eventually the only choice was to step in and take a definitive "No, not ever." stance.

It's not the same scenario, the gaming landscape in general has changed dramatically since then and frankly this continued assumption that the community can't handle it or that they can't produce mods worth paying for is bloody insulting.

As we already talked about (other thread) it is the same sceneraio when there is no curation at all. As we have seen already shady practices happen in business (ingame advertisment remember) no way around it. We already had people testing the water with endorsemant maximising, another example. (Don't want to mention the other things that are talked about, because I couldn't look at them myself).

I am not against compensation for mod developers. I am against destroying the free mod developer community with all that quarrel that mods as business bring in.

Btw. some of the shady business practices where true, some where lies (in case of SIMS 2) and all was the result of the unneeded fight because EA decieded to lean back and don't react at all. For me the same scenario is happening atm. where the mod dev "community" kills itself over this topic.

About the "community cant handle":

It's over and see still it its a topic that divides. Human nature doesn't change.

The same exact thing was happening with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim paid mods on the Steam Workshop.

Bethesda Softworks, Bethesda Game Studios, and VALVe just let thieves upload stolen mods to sell to earn easy money. Although the 19 or whatever amount of mods that debuted for sale were not stolen. They let the thieves reign free.

Also all these legal problems that would happen with the illegal problems. Needing to hire lawyers ,etc. It's just not worth it to have paid mods at all. I don't remember where I read it I think it was that forbes.com article where they talked about laywers, legal problems, and illegal problems.

So I still say mods need to remain 100% free because of these problems as well. We do not have infinite money.

In this day and age where the video game industry already nickel and dimes us heavily with so many DLC's and microtransactions. Paid mods are worse than that.

And as was stated in that thread which was specifically about finding a working solution. The workshop implementation was the problem, not the fundamental idea. It can work and there's no reason why it working has to destroy anything, change yes, destroy no.

See above and again, nobody is trying to nickel and dime you, you are not obliged to pay for anything you don't want to buy, the same really goes for any and all paid content but that's a different discussion that I'm not going to have.

As modder Forli stated on the other thread:

Each of his points are about as pessimistic and fear mongering as you can get. And again, it's insulting that the assumption is a marketplace with no quality mods, I don't care if an experienced and internet famous modder says it or some redditor who hasn't been around since dragonborn shipped, it's offensive.

No, its human nature to act differently when profit motive is involved.

Insulting, fearmongering, offensive and insult... (you take concerns also as a insult? See what I mean with that business brings quarrel in?)

Question: How many big mods have you made, and how many collaborations?

And in another thread I provided an example if own professional environment that doesn't set on fire because of profit.

Things will change, yes, they absolutely will. But what you and others are implying is that mod authors aren't grown up enough to handle money being in the equation.

The fact that you're so ignorant to how offensive all of this is and think the status quo trumps people wanting choice in the matter is equally offensive, if or won't work then it won't work and people will come back or not.

It does work then a brand new revenue stream supporting the people making content you want and clearly enjoy opens up and the same happens for Bethesda.

I can only assume that you like these video games and it's baffling to me that you don't want them to be as successful as physically possible.

Everything I've shared is in my signiature, I've not insinuated at any point that I'm hot sh*t, hell I've even gone as far as to say I wouldn't even be confident enough to sell what I've made, I'm certainly interested though.

I've spent thousands of hours in the CK working on things I both have and haven't shared. I've spent I don't even know how many hours of my free time answering questions about how to do things that are similar or even the same.

But by the same token, no, I've never been a part of a collaborative effort on a mod, but if the landscape were to change there due to money then were those people ever really doing any of this for the "right reasons" everyone keeps preaching? They clearly weren't in it for the love of sharing or whatever if the thought of getting paid corrupts them that absolutely.

Edit: And lastly, I'm not even trying to bash or insult that mod author, he's probably a lovely guy, but I don't agree with his points and he's still preaching this "quality of mods will suffer" argument and that's the part that I think is offensive to the community in general. But whatever, be angry.

You said:

You have given us no details of your situation. This is not evidence -- its opinion. Furthermore, cooperation between people who work together is totally different from cooperation between strangers on the internet.different

Well it's unfortunate you can't take it at face value, it's already more of work then I'm willing to talk about on the internet.

And again, you're seeing and expecting the absolute worst of people and it doesn't have to be and usually isn't the case from what I've at least seen communicating with other modders.

If I were intent on seeing the worst in the people preaching free modding forever I'd pack up my things and leave for good. Maybe if you tried to see the positives and potentials of the idea instead of assuming everyone will turn into seething, money grabbing fraudsters you'd see why now not having the opportunity is so damaging to some.

Even Brumbek, who came out in support of paid mods (listed to 1:33:45 of the interview where Brumbek says: “ I just think it would have been the best for the Skyrim community, and going back to what you were asking Total Biscuit, will they will revisit this? I don’t think they will revisit it . . . and that means that Skyrim modding will be worse for it, so this is not a victory, I consider this a massive defeat for progress in modding and the quality Skyrim. . . . This would have made the game a better thing to play.”) admitted that having paid mods would interfere with free and open cooperation (listen to 1:43:39 “I don’t necessarily think they would have to do it for a new game. I think there are some issues with doing it right at the start of a new game because when a new game comes out that’s when people are first trying to learn the modding and I do think there is an element of you want people working together and that sort of thing.”).

It was a genuine question and I am not angry at all. We can disagree with each other without these words like offensive, preaching,....

It is sad that you weren't able to work on collaboritions, but yes in these projects is now the question here, do I get as someone who participates compensation for the work that I do and who gets which cut.

Understandable but sadly actually not dooable in the most cases (who knows if the mod will sell or accepted). It adds more problems thats a fact.

Beeing in for the love of sharing, includes only beeing in for the love of sharing not selling. Yes!

That means it won't be shared with the commercial projects and here we are again with sadly only a limited amount of resources for commercial projects which has a effect on the quality.

With commercial mods Resource Pack maker have to think about the license they are using for their work and for some it is simply to much hazzle.

Calling people ignorant and saying you think it offensive when people disagree with you is not making your arguments any more credible.

Brumbek is really far out of touch. He said that paid modding would lead to increased quality in mods in a win-win for both modders and mod-users. Bethesda and Valve thought this too. We could already see from the first few days, this did not happen. It's like this: Supporters of paid-mods thought we'd get expansion quality stuff because the modders would have much bigger motivation. However, what actually happened was that we got tiny micro-DLC stuff being sold for 0.50$. Modding was quickly turning into what the DLC industry has become and it would have killed modding.

Paid mods will never work because for paid things we expect a level of quality that mods very rarely provide. There would also have been legal issues from people reusing other people's assets in their mods or people who contributed to the mod at some point not getting paid. Valve showed us that they couldn't be trusted to weed out mods that stole assets, mods that were stolen off the Nexus, etc.

Paid mods would not have helped modding in any way and would have killed it.

You might be right, but extrapolating your conclusions from data taken over the first two highly turbulent days is pretty poor form.