Were there ever any paid maps or mods? (+discussion)

[TheBadHustlex]

Huh. I though only AD2 was sold. As it's a 100% original game.

[Nash]

I will tell you why the Doom community is thriving the way it is - there is no business, no competition. Have you seen how indie development forums/Facebook groups are like? Everyone and their mother are making basically the same game over and over again, and every post is "vote for me on Greenlight" / "fund my Kickstarter" / "buy my game on the appstore" and speaking of app stores, there's probably literally thousands of low quality products that any cool product is hidden so deep...

My point? When money gets involved, it's no longer passion - it becomes business. And businesses have little concern for passion and artistic creativity. You kill the art with business. In the imaginary situation that Doom mods can be monetized, you can bet that the community will die and will be nothing like it is now.

(This was one of the concerns touched on during the Skyrim paid mod fiasco. You suddenly see authors who you once thought were cool suddenly turn into greedy pigs and making dick moves like taking their mods down and forcing people to pay for them... money brings out the worst in people, period)

[Ghastly]

Everyone and their mother are making basically the same game over and over again, and every post is "vote for me on Greenlight" / "fund my Kickstarter" / "buy my game on the appstore" and speaking of app stores, there's probably literally thousands of low quality products that any cool product is hidden so deep...

Not just that, but in my opinion these groups tend to slow down a lot when they've already gotten paid for a game they haven't finished yet. Stardrive is a pretty good example; the developer released an alpha with a laundry list of features he was going to implement (such as multiplayer) and charged for it. One day decided he was done and most of those features were never implemented (multiplayer included, which kind of makes the game pretty bad for a 4x).

On the subject of paid mods, I do not want to turn this thread into yet another discussion of this mod, but the Doom community's already seen a pretty good example of how paid mods could be a bad idea. Could you imagine if he was able to charge for that? People used the argument when the Workshop introduced paid mods that the community would basically curate the mod selection and would down-vote anything dishonest into oblivion, but the general reaction to this mod shows how unreliable that could be.

Edit: I should say, when I said "how paid mods could be a bad idea," I mean an automatic thing like when Steam Workshop charged for mods. Action Doom 2's a great example of a paid mod working well, but at that point I think it's more of an indie game.

[cambertian]

From what I remember, Malice, Shrak and X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse were all unofficial mods sold at retail, all using the Quake engine as a base. I don't think there was much backlash towards those (other than the backlash against their sometimes shoddy quality.)

I'm all for paid mods, personally. Or at least a donation button. Something so that I could at least buy the mod-maker a meal if I like his stuff.

[Arctangent]

X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse

In all fairness, the fact that this was gotten away with is more of a testament to how little attention was paid to the modding community at the time, considering that's a legal issue from two fronts instead of the standard one most mods have to deal with.

[Captain Ventris]

Action Doom 1 had like 3 or so physical copies printed. i can't remember from the top of my head how they were given out, some kind of contest inside the game i believe?

They were given out based on who could find the secret item in each level and send the list to Scuba Steve. I say this so I can, as I always seek to do, remind everyone else that I was number one, whoooooo!

[leileilol]

From what I remember, Malice, Shrak and X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse were all unofficial mods sold at retail, all using the Quake engine as a base. I don't think there was much backlash towards those (other than the backlash against their sometimes shoddy quality.)

I'm all for paid mods, personally. Or at least a donation button. Something so that I could at least buy the mod-maker a meal if I like his stuff.

The unique thing about these sold addons is that they have to absolutely contain 0 Quake materials, so when honorable map compilations rolled around (BSP textures are internally stored which will make that difficult)... you can guess what happened. *cough*bad textures replacing everything*cough*

There was controversy over Malice, AoP, and FvF though. Malice was once uploaded as a free TC...briefly, originally. FvF was crippleware. AoP had an asshole publisher (the freeware rerelease detests them at the start of every game).

X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse

In all fairness, the fact that this was gotten away with is more of a testament to how little attention was paid to the modding community at the time,

It was authorized.

[scalliano]

"Don't take crap from 2-bit criminals"?

[Sunbeam]

Thanks for all of your answers.
I think we can summarize the thread like this: We are about 90% sure that paid mods would be illegal and that as well about 90% of the Doomers here would not want to see anything like this.
I read up a bit about the Skyrim mods thing and I have to say that I agree with Valve's initial idea behind paid mods. I'm absolutely sure that whatever gets sold there will be some greedy people selling other people's work. But just like with indie games I think there could be many legit games/mods were the money would help their authors. However I also understand that right now everything in the Doom community is a work of passion. And we can't really complain about there being too few mods
So while it could be interesting to see paid mods, I think the current situation is good enough
Happy Dooming everyone!

[edward850]

Thanks for all of your answers.
I think we can summarize the thread like this: We are about 90% sure that paid mods would be illegal

Is 90 the new 100?

[Hellser]

Is 90 the new 100?

That 10% would pay for anything that's made by a certain Sargeant.

[Vegeta(dw)]

You can always contact the author and offer him/her a donation in private even if he/she didn't ask for one.

[Edward-san]

As much as I've wanted to accept donations and/or Kickstarter funds for a large-scale project, I would not be able to do this in good conscience, because a lot of my work relies on using others' works as a base. Accepting money for what isn't technically my work to start with is a serious ethical problem, which is a big reason why I have never solicited donations for anything.

What about sharing the donations between you and all the other authors? If they agree to accept money, where would be the problem?

[TheBadHustlex]

Well, if you use sounds from games like Half Life, Medal of Honor, Killing Floor...
It's pretty difficult to do that.

[wildweasel]

What about sharing the donations between you and all the other authors? If they agree to accept money, where would be the problem?

TheBadHustlex has the right of it. When I say a lot of my work is based on the work of other people, I mean a LOT of source files were taken from other places that would be very difficult to track down authorship for, a lot of it completely unauthorized (stuff from commercial games, etc.). I'm not capable of producing an entire mod's worth of high-quality content by myself, and stuff from royalty-free/public domain sources does not always live up to my standards of quality, so I do a lot of borrowing. I cannot, in any good conscience, accept money or donations for work that is not mine.