Originally Posted by
Celtic Magister
There is an aspect about this entire debate that I have not seen too commonly in the discussion, save for being vaguely referenced by Caligula on the first page, in regard to competition. I consider it highly important to consider:
Many aspiring modders, myself included, often turn to their peers, fellow modders and artists within the community for assistance, support, and even team coordination. TWcenter itself has always highly favored this behavior by having enough forums for any modder to get the help he/she needs, or to ask for the assistance of others. What I believe many misunderstand is that when money becomes involved in the process of modding, polite teamwork and a sense of community goes right out the window. Instead of a modder viewing their community as a place to ask questions and receive help, their community becomes competition, and every single person modding the same game becomes competition. This is business logic, and the foundations of Capitalism as we know it. Competition in the business world drives quality and evolution, yet in the modding world, competition actually stifles quality. Why? Because modders who are aspiring and learning will have no further space to grow when larger modders who have worked on their mods for years begin asking for money for their content. They would offer no assistance of any time to newer modders just starting out in the great world of modding. After all, it is human nature to put down competition, and destroy perceived threats. Money would undoubtedly take preeminence over the sense of community.
It is human nature to put an end to competition, and when this comes into play with modding, the community will suffer from a decline in mods. Fewer new generation modders will bother with modding, unable to rely on their more experienced peers and their modding community as a whole becoming a rabble of modders aggressively competing for the money of the game's fans and players. When the number of mods declines, the number of players interested in the game declines likewise, and the game looses whatever community was built around it.
I understand the desire to be compensated for a hobby which consumes lots of time. However, personally, I consider playing the game itself to be a hobby on the same level as modding the game, and for many modders, modding the game becomes more fun than actually playing it. Should one expect compensation for merely playing a game? A person will spend just as much time playing a game and becoming skilled at it as they will modding, learning from peers, and becoming a talented modder. Donations are a different matter. Tools used for modding can indeed be expensive, yet putting the mod behind a paywall outright does no good. If a modder places their mod behind a paywall only for the sake of "being compensated for their time", they should take a look at the bigger picture, and consider the skills they are learning while they mod. With that said, donations are often unnecessary for the same reasons.
The files of many games, old, and new are written in a still widely used programming language, such as C++ or C#, if one becomes skilled enough with either of those languages, they can take those skills to a professional workplace and make many times more money programming than they will forcing fans of a game to pay for their mods. That is the bigger picture. Modding pays for itself in many different ways. Not only in terms of skill and technical acumen, but also in terms of who you will get to know while you associate with peers in modding and ingrain yourself into a community. A modder who seeks money for their mods is wasting the skills they have learned from others and while modding the game for enjoyment. Just about anything you do in modding, from creating models to programming an AI has a job equivalent in the professional world.
Let's also not forget that when money becomes involved, the number of legalities involved increases exponentially. You would have to create every bit of content in your mod from scratch, with no support, but rivalry from other modders, and no nicely organized free tutorials to assist you, if you were to release a successful mod in a community where mods require money to download and play. Otherwise, you would risk lawsuits, and other legal issues from corporations and individual.
If I have said anything in this post that is blatantly false, foolish, or ignorant, I invite whoever knows better to rebuke my opinion on the matter with hard evidence. I ask for but one example where a modding community with paid mods thrives more than a modding community with free mods. I am legitimately curious as to whether or not there are any cases where paid mods have fostered a thriving, friendly, and evolving gaming community.