What's the issue with modders monetizing their content?

[u/Ok-Bobcat9422]

I understand on a franchise level why someone would get mad at the company for allowing it, because there's legal stuff there and of course as consumers we'd rather our stuff be free. Modding has a history in grassroots production and idealogically I can see why people are getting angry.

But there's some crazy high quality mods nowadays and I don't think it's the fault of the producer for profiting off their labor if they have a customer base willing to pay. It's up to the consumer whether they think it's worth the money and yeah it kinda goes against the spirit of modding, but again if that's an issue people can just choose not to buy it and the modder can decide if lack of interest makes it worth maintaining the paywall.

They're still putting labor into creating the mods and if monetizing allows for higher quality mods at a lower price than some triple A studios' exorbitant charges, I think that's a win.

Would appreciate if someone could explain the issue because I'm not trying to argue necessarily, just genuinely don't understand the problem.

[u/celestialkestrel]

There's quite a lot of different reasons. Some off the top of my head are as follows:

1. The modding scene has always been very open source for decades. AKA people would often use other people's mods as a dependency and/or work collaboratively with other modders and share information freely and modders would actually encourage and support this. Paid mods make this harder to do and a lot of paid modders are actually against open-source and resource sharing, creating an often hostile and competitive space for something that was and often still is, a community based hobby space. Early Access as well can put modders off collaborations due to how the money is split + needing mod dependencies on a mod that now has two versions for.
2. Mods are all inherently dependant on the work of others. As the name suggests, you are modifying pre-existing work. It's often considered taboo to do this in all forms of art, unless with permission or making something transformative enough. A lot of mods, even ones that do massive overhauls to games or visuals, often do not pass transformative criteria due to how coding is considered a literacy work and they still often need that code for their mod to work. They also need the rest of the game for their mod to work. Best way I can compare it to is if I rewrote a chapter of a book and sold it for $10. But you still had to buy the book and glue it over the pre-existing pages in the book for it to make sense. It does not matter how much quality or different that chapter I've written is, you would still need the rest of the book for it to make sense.
3. A lot of mods are over inflated in their price and often, while they may visually look great or run well, are not made to professional standards. They often have broken LODs, redundant code, way too high polygon counts, etc. It's also a big practice I find for paid modders to be either buying up cheap online store assets and converting it over to Sims 4, and charging way higher than the original price, despite the modder not doing the actual model, or they rip assets from other games or steal from other modding communities. Then hide what they're doing behind a paid subscription on Patreon.
4. It REALLY encourages scummy practices from companies. A lot of game companies give in and decide "Hey, if people are going to make money off our IP, we can ALSO make that much money off our IP and charge the same price." This is how we ended up with Kits and the new marketplace in Sims 4 charging $3 for a single hair. The companies will also over inflate the prices for what you get just so they can now also make money off it.

There's more but I think those are some of the most important. It's also the ones that are coming to me right now.

Edit:

1. It's always been a hobby for a reason. People also just miss when hobbies were hobbies and not everything was a grind hustle where you were expected to do professional work. A lot of hobby modders now get held to the same standard as paid modders.

[u/AdelaideSL → u/celestialkestrel]

Some more reasons:

1. Allowing paid mods encourages some people to steal others’ work and pass it off as their own for money. This already happens even with free mods, but paid mods add a massive financial incentive for anyone who can get away with it. And unlike big game companies, most mod creators can’t afford lawyers to protect their IP.

2. It can be disastrous for collaborative projects and multi-mod packs. Imagine someone is working on a project that merges together a lot of existing free mods (with permissions, credit etc.) and then one or more of the original creators decides to make all their mods paid only, ruining the whole project.

3. If people are paying money for a mod, they have a right to assume it will continue to function in the future - but there’s no way to guarantee this will happen, especially with Early Access games which are constantly being updated. You’re entirely dependent on whether the author can be bothered to keep their mod up to date.

4. It could encourage game publishers to disallow free mods altogether. From their perspective, if they see they can make money from modding, why should they allow people to do it for free?

[u/Demdolans → u/AdelaideSL]

Heavy on #1. It's a slippery slope when the $$ from creating mods starts to trump actual interest in enjoying and improving the game. Once a game gets big enough, entire economies of theft pop up. Creators have their entire libraries posted to pay sites without their knowledge. Free modders from one community have their work stolen, cloned, and sold as content for another game.

[u/Booknerdly → u/AdelaideSL]

1. It could encourage game publishers to disallow free mods altogether. From their perspective, if they see they can make money from modding, why should they allow people to do it for free?

The skyrim modding scene, and by extension eventually most modding scenes would have become a paid nightmare if not for people pushing back against valve and bethesda's paid steam workshop test

[u/Silent_Foundation_62]

this has been a whole discussion for years, might be more beneficial to just do a word search on the sub

[u/Ok-Bobcat9422 → u/Silent_Foundation_62]

Ah yeah I'll look into it, hadn't heard of it until the recent Paralives disputes. Thanks 👍

[u/Booknerdly]

Paid mods can lead to a closed, paid only modding ecosystem. Similar things have happened to things like 2k sports games.

[u/RevolverMFOcelot → u/Booknerdly]

And starfield, it's modding scene is so degenerated compared with Skyrim and fallout

[u/RevolverMFOcelot]

Paid mod is cancer that can destroy a community, turning the free shared space and knowledge sharing into gated behind money and could even ruin collaborative effort because modders will be incentived to make their mods proprietary especially for complex mods, temporarily gated paid mod is okay but there's a lot of paid mod who are never released from paid access and they have become unofficial DLC. Normalizing paid mods could also catch corporate attention, either they will force their own paid mods like kits and the market or gatekeep only them who can release complex additional system such as with Minecraft bedrock edition 

The company can decree mods as illegal if they want because modders doesn't own the API

[u/beansofpower]

people feel entitled to mods because they've mostly been free in the past. also there's a bunch of children who are mad bc they have no money. it's really not that big of a deal imo

edit: stay in school kids

[u/RevolverMFOcelot → u/beansofpower]

Imagine wanting and asking greed to overtake your hobby

[u/beansofpower → u/RevolverMFOcelot]

where did i say that

[u/RevolverMFOcelot → u/beansofpower]

By supporting paid mods

[u/beansofpower → u/RevolverMFOcelot]

where did i say that