On Paid Mods

Hello guys, this one is just going to be a quickie. I'm mostly writing this since I don't really have anything else to do (I'm still waiting on a video to export and can't do shit on my computer until its done) and so its not really going to have any fancy pictures or formatting or be written particularly well -- yet I still think its a good time to talk about something that's been plaguing the minds of every PC gamer recently. It's about paid mods.

For those of you who don't like to read walls of text, here's a quick summary.

Should paid mods be a thing?

Absolutely.

Is the way Valve/Zenimax approaching paid mods the way it should be done?

Absolutely not.


The actual idea of paying for mods isn't that bad. After all, the modders are still doing work -- and as long as they aren't just, say, taking the mesh of Frostmorne and putting it into Skyrim, they should be paid for their work. And, of course, modders can always make their mods free, and people can choose whichever ones they want.

The only problem with this is that it can't be forced. It has to be something that developed naturally, and that all of the community had gotten to accept. But that never happened. The standard for mods have always been that they have been free. If this had happened naturally, this attack would have never happened.

Now, you have a massive fracture in the once peaceful modding community. You have massive exoduses from community sites that have been there for years already (see the 600+ mods taken off of the Nexus), massive backlash against the publisher and valve, and modders who have decided to take this to their own personal benefit on malicious levels (see SkyUI creator making his mod unavailable to those who got it for free, or the numerous "lite" versions of mods with ads popping up) so now the question simply begs: can they fix it so that this system can work?

No, they can't. They can, if they're as resilient as Ubisoft or EA, deal with the criticism until there's no more steam left in the protesting and people finally get used to it. But as for finding a way to make paid mods work without just taking them down in there entirety is at best moot.

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