Darkedone02 profile

He's responsible for some of the greatest PC games of all time, maybe if you're in your 20's or younger you wouldn't know that. Godus and Fable 3 sucked but history has absolutely not taught us that "he's one of the worse of the worst game devs." That's asinine.

Yup.

These days? No one has liked price hikes EVER. People have been making the same complaints about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer for literal centuries now.

Games have slowly risen in price, climbing faster than inflation. There’s a limit to how much people can/want to invest into gaming, but there's also a value for everything. Mods at the moment are a way for avid fans to invest into the community and help develop/grow the game they love. There's a market for that, both the devs and the players benefit from this (increased content + increased sales). This is not something that would change. Content creators whose goal is to entertain (not profit) would continue the same way. Many modders are against paid mods, and there’d be no requirement for them to charge people for their content. The benefits for a system such as this though, are rather clear.

I believe the logic of paid mods is to increase the size of a games modding community. To offer a cash incentive to premium quality modders is an efficient way of drawing more modders to the scene, as well as improve the quality of the mods in general. New modders would appear and develop content for games that wouldn’t have existed without the cash incentive. It is not like the free mods community would notably shrink because of this platform, but instead that new content previously unfeasible for the mod community could now be produced to sell.

To talk about money, I’d have to start with correcting your off-predictions. To begin with, why do you believe you’ll have to buy the game twice to play it in VR? Are you accounting for the cost of VR hardware? Or is this Bethesda trying to charge again for Skyrim/Fallout VR. Either way, it is still arguable whether or not VR is the best experience, considering the low pixel-count for the large field-of-view the screen takes up. Also, for those willing to invest into a VR headset, I’m sure paid mods is not the largest addition to invest into. Then within the mods section, you seem to think it’ll cost you $100-200 to get the ‘premium experience’. Paid mods would not be something required. In just the same way as how you’d invest into LoL or a game’s official DLC, you don’t need to own a paid mod at the start of the game. You can comfortably buy it later should you find it has good reviews and like the look of the content, or should you decide otherwise you can always watch a Let's-Play to experience the content 2nd-hand. It's worth noting again that this paid content would not be available for free either way. You'd still have all your free mods available to download/enjoy, there'd be no shortage of content.

Modders are investing large amounts of their time and effort into content for people to enjoy. I can totally get behind a method for the mod creators to charge for their content, so long as the premium taken by the service provider isn't too high (personally, I think it should be the same as Steam's deal to devs: 70% goes to the modders, 30% to service providers + game producers). At the moment I agree that these platform providers are being greedy (as Braneman pointed out), but that does not change my stance on the matter: paid mods is something that should be offered to content creators. It will only improve the quality of the mods and increase the longevity of the games. To argue against a paid platform; requesting that people shouldn’t make more premium content because your scared it’ll make you invest more; seems idiotic to me.

I found it so funny how people jumped to blame Bethesda for the paid mods front. They were never pocketing any money from the Steam's paid mods development. Valve was taking their standard rate for data holding/distribution, and the rest was going to the mod creators.

Problem is as you say: mods have been free up to this point, so nowadays people believe they are entitled to the things. Introducing a paywall would increase the range and depth of mods, resulting in a larger experience with more longevity to each game community. It is a plus for everyone, assuming the public stop throwing a tantrum over it, selling $1000 iron swords and other rubbish to try and abuse the system.

I believe this is what Bethesda are trying to do here: lock the mod list behind there own security checks, to ensure the market grows sensibly. If the modders taste the money, they should get interested enough to invest more into the game for people to enjoy. Conversely, if the paid mod list grows large enough with enough high quality new content, the public will start investing into it. A secondary currency sounds like a bad idea to me (using Gems/Coins instead of £/$) since it introduces a second paywall between the user and them owning the mod. Either way, we should hope this time they succeed. Introducing profits to the content creators is the way to fuel the economy's growth.