Modding in 2017 | $, Perms, Piracy, and more

[creeperlava]

Jan 12, 2017 12:07:52 GMT ottemis said:

Jan 12, 2017 8:22:43 GMT creeperlava said:

That's exactly the problem, money and demand takes over creativity. You start creating things for the audience, not for yourself. That's my biggest issue with paid modding, and what I think would kill large scale modding altogether.

I don't create all these Mods for 'myself' anymore, that ship has sailed a LONG time ago my friend. Its more a compulsion now. Worse even, i have never played any game through with my own Mods.

Nowadays i create for the pleasure of creating. For the challenge. Sometimes by request if i'm feeling it. I don't see that changing. You think i don't pay attention to my audience now? That's why I've released so many variations on things for instance. I wouldn't say that killed the creativity, would you?

I haven't played ME in a while either, although I'm definitely planning to once my mod is in a finished state.
Please note that I didn't say you don't pay attention to your audience, in the contrary. You said it yourself, being paid for modding would require you to pay much more attention to what people who paid for the mod ask for. I don't see it as creativity though, since you're following other people's ideas (not meant negatively).

It's a very interesting debate, in any case, especially since we don't agree all on it.

[giftfish]

I, for one, am glad to see this new forum section being successfully used

I'll likely pull the permissions template out into its own thread. It's sort of become its own discrete discussion/project.

[sil]

I've made my position quite clear really, but I can see why someone would want to get paid for all the hours they put in, however, I think the impact to the modding community would be disastrous. The community as a whole would change completely, I think the community would be destroyed because instead of working together people would start working behind paywalls, which then segregates a community between those who can pay and those who can't. Not only that but people would begin to hoard their work rather than working in teams because of the logistics in working out who gets paid for what.

Also, once it becomes a business, that's when things get dodgy too, companies would leap on it as another revenue stream and the community, fan roots of it all would begin to fade away. I love creating things, I love modding, and many of my games have had vastly inflated lifecycles because of the mods I've enjoyed, and paid mods would drive me from the scene. It would probably shrink the modding scene too. The only positive I can see if that you -may- get some professional modding teams who crack out some incredible stuff, but I think that'd be rare.

However, I feel the best way forward are donations where a fair percentage of the donation goes to the company that owns the game. That way the modding community isn't adversely affected as no-one is separated from anyone else by paywalls, modders won't feel they have to hoard their stuff because they're worried about how the pay will be shared out, and you'd still see team efforts. You'd get paid too. Sure, not as much as if you were charging for the mod, but you would still earn -something-.

I'm just glad we don't have to pay for them currently. It took me months to save up the little spare change I had to buy ME3 and the DLC, if I had to pay for mods now, I'd not be able to at all, leaving me out of a scene I dearly enjoy.

[ottemis]

I dunno, depends on implementation surely. Another thing, as long as they do this for future games, rather than also make it available for games already out (they really shouldn't imho), there's no saying how that would affect the modding community I think. If I look at how much time I've spent modding the ME series vs for instance DAI, under the new engine I just had wayyy less to do, and the mods that spawn from that are centred differently.
I reckon it completely depends on the quality of assets and storyline of whichever game this system would be applied to. I suspect I'll have much less of an urge to mod Andromeda in terms of 'fixing' it. Then texture modding would almost solely revolve around offering more choice, rather than actual vanilla fixes and improvements.

[mgamerz]

I've talked to some of the devs from BioWare and their seemingly distant or negative stance of mods (in terms of embracing them).

They say they keep it distant cause embracing it makes them open to people thinking the company supports the mod itself. They used an HD texture pack mod from another one of their games as an example, users loved it, so did the devs, but there was this one bug that the game engine had that prevented it from working properly, and for some reason BioWare got a lot of hate by the modding userbase for not fixing it even though the games support window had ended and they had no obligation to fix it either.

I assume there's also a lot of legal stuff to having a mod marketplace that BioWare didn't want to have to deal with.

[neph]

There's a lot of stuff BioWare doesn't want to deal with. Doesn't mean they shouldn't, just that they don't want to.

In terms of modding, I am SO the new kid on the block here - I've been working on one mod for over a year and I haven't gotten very far. I sincerely lack the base knowledge to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish and so I have to learn as I go. That puts me at a severe disadvantage in this discussion because lack of experience.

But - frankly, I can see ottemis' point pretty clearly. C'mon, people - raise your hands if you don't use her textures in your game. Because pretty much everyone does. Heck, after I put in ALOT, I replace some textures with ottemis' because hers are better. A modder dedicates time and energy (sweat and tears and blood, dammit) into creating a project - I have seen it. And the revisions! Every time I turn around, there's a EGM update I don't have! There's a new compatibility pack for one or another of the mods I use - all of them created by people here. If any one of them wanted donations to support those efforts, I'd be happy to donate. Because their efforts, which have vastly improved my experience, not as a modder, but as a player, are worth my money. I don't even have to come at this discussion as a fledgling-modder - I can come at it as a user of mods and say that yes, I completely understand all of the objections (and incidentally love that permissions list) but at the end of it, I come down on the side of supporting a reasonable, sane, logical - and lots of other words like that - system of reimbursing mod creators financially for their work.

[giftfish]

Will get that permissions list sorted into a new thread after I am done with this blasted file streaming sequencing

[ottemis]

Neph, I love you.

[benji]

Time to play devil's advocate - If charging for mods became a thing, would anyone try to charge for access to ME3Explorer itself? I would argue that it is the product of crazy amounts of time and dedication just as much as any mods made with it, but is also MIT licensed. Would anyone favor starting work on a new toolset, starting with a codebase of nothing, and charge for it? Starting from scratch would take quite a bit of work, but it sounds feasable, now that we as a community have all the insight that we do into how the toolset works. It would also be nice to organize the code better and design the entirity of the UI from scratch (I'm not saying I dislike the awesome current home screen, by the way). But then it wouldn't be an open-source project anymore. How would we decide who gets access? Or who gets the profits?

Interesting questions to consider, and I'm not taking a side (in this post).

[giftfish]

Jan 16, 2017 0:05:57 GMT benji said:

Time to play devil's advocate - If charging for mods became a thing, would anyone try to charge for access to ME3Explorer itself? I would argue that it is the product of crazy amounts of time and dedication just as much as any mods made with it, but is also MIT licensed. Would anyone favor starting work on a new toolset, starting with a codebase of nothing, and charge for it? Starting from scratch would take quite a bit of work, but it sounds feasable, now that we as a community have all the insight that we do into how the toolset works. It would also be nice to organize the code better and design the entirity of the UI from scratch (I'm not saying I dislike the awesome current home screen, by the way). But then it wouldn't be an open-source project anymore. How would we decide who gets access? Or who gets the profits?

Interesting questions to consider, and I'm not taking a side (in this post).

While I would love to get paid for the amount of work and time I put into the toolset, I'd say unquestionably no. For the same reasons that modders can't actually charge for their mods (donations are different, but still a bit risky). BioWare would absolutely not be okay with this. If we decided to try charging for access to ME3Explorer, I'd almost guarantee we'd hear from their lawyers, so it doesn't pay to discuss it further than that. The toolset exists due to the original creators "toeing the line" of BW's EULA (if not stepping over it entirely). If we get money involved, then we literally dive over the line. So... no. A big no on that one.

As far as the UI, the main window has already been redesigned, and we have a template in the works that will be used for all tools as they are converted to WPF.

[kfreon]

I haven't thrown in here yet, so I will now.
I don't know how I feel about paid mods, but I have no issue with donations IN PRINCIPLE.
For Mass Effect, donations are not a good idea since, like Gift said, we're bypassing Bioware here.
But I'm not a modder, so I haven't put a ton of thought into it.

I also don't think charging for the toolset is a good idea ever. Sure we put a lot of work into it, but for fun and the community (that's me anyway), not for money. Once again, donations are fine IN PRINCIPLE, just not for this project.
Money breaks projects like this when people argue over it.
Opinions aside, Bioware would smack us down, and I don't want to be backhanded by Bioware.

EDIT: And actually, for projects where people can move on and stuff, I don't like donations at all since some people who did a bunch of work might have moved on and get no money.
So TLDR, no money across the board. That's not the point of this entire endeavour. 

[ottemis]

I think it would be difficult to monetize the toolset as it has (or would have, even on a rewrite) so many contributors. I see this as a problem for mods that feature work by multiple authors as well.
Will there be a system to support a split in profit from sales, how do you determine that split? I think this is something with a lot of potential to cause a lot of disagreement in the modding community.
How do you value your work and contribution against others, etc.

As to how I'd feel about it. I'll never say I don't feel the effort that went into the toolset deserves to be rewarded, because I do. However, and I feel duplicitous saying it, I honestly don't think it would be a good idea. But aside from all of this, I suspect it's a moot point regardless as I doubt Bioware would retroactively monetize modding for older games and in the current situation I judge monetizing is a bad move, whether it's mods or the toolset itself.

[benji]

I absolutely agree. I mainly asked the question as a counterargument to the "I put many hours of work into my mod therefore I can charge for it" point of view, although I totally see why some people feel that way.

To be totally clear, I am against monetizing the toolkit for both practical (BioWare) reasons and ideological ones (Withholding otherwise-unknown knowledge to make a profit).

[sil]

www.pcgamer.com/valve-modders-absolutely-need-to-be-paid/

This topic just became even more relevant. If Valve does it and sticks to it, EA are guaranteed to follow, they love the money. I know for some people this is a step in the right direction and they will be interested, but for me personally as a modder of nearly 15 years, its terrible news. I feel quite sad about it.

[giftfish]

Feb 11, 2017 10:19:21 GMT sil said:

www.pcgamer.com/valve-modders-absolutely-need-to-be-paid/

This topic just became even more relevant. If Valve does it and sticks to it, EA are guaranteed to follow, they love the money. I know for some people this is a step in the right direction and they will be interested, but for me personally as a modder of nearly 15 years, its terrible news. I feel quite sad about it.

Make no mistake, this is coming. That's partly why I started the thread