I've been a part of several modding communities over the years (never did anything in most of them, but I've contributed to a few). This one of course, FreeSpace, BattleZone 2, Baldur's Gate, Super Mario World and some others. I've seen some amazing work come out of all of these communities;
Demon Eclipse and
Double-Impact from Doom's communities, the
BG1NPC Project and
Sword Coast Stratagems for Baldur's Gate, the
MediaVPs and
Blue Planet series for FreeSpace,
SMWC Productions for SMW, etc.. Then there are the massive endeavors like
Hexen: Edge of Chaos,
Doom 3: Phobos,
STALKER: Lost Alpha,
Halo CMT SPV3 and others. It would be great if the authors, some of whom are my friends, some I really look up to and almost all who are really awesome people, could be compensated for the huge amount of work they've put into these. But there is a huge amount of abuse that this kind of pay-for-mod system could lead to.
For one, I should point out that Brutal Doom initially started as a copy/paste of two or three different mods and gained in popularity from there. Apparently Steam paid workshop
already has problems with people copy/pasting other authors' work. Even if you like Brutal Doom and are of the opinion that he took those authors' work to new heights, could you imagine if Sgt Mark made
money off of their work from the start?
Valve is already really bad at quality control. There are several God-awful games like
Revelations 2012, copyright infringements like
Bloodbath Kavkaz and even the
lazy,
outright,
scam The War Z. Then they announced
neither Valve nor Bethesda will be curating the mods for sale, which has led to
several joke and protest mods. How do you think this will turn out?
Major Cooke wrote:In reality, mod makers truly aren't making a fucking mint at all.
The author also
makes only a 25% revenue share, by the way. Even if mod piracy wasn't a thing, they wouldn't really be making anything anyway. This isn't Valve's/Bethesda's opportunity to support modders for their hard work, it's just a cash-grab.