Sprked Tries To Solve Valve's Paid Mods Scandal

SlappingOysters writes: This article takes a closer look at the emerging crowdfunding platform Sprked, which aims to follow the Patreon support model, but exclusively for video game modders. The service is currently in its early stages, but by crafting a system of appreciation and support that acknowledges the loyalty of the modding community, Sprked has the potential to promote and foster the creativity that is so integral to modding, instead of hampering it with the murky baggage of a mandatory economy. Valve's attempt to let modders make some money for their efforts backfired within the community — there are four demons the paid mods plan must slay to actually work.

Comments

So... redundant, in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as Patreon disgusts me, it works. We don't need a second one.

Re:So... redundant, in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you elaborate on why Patreon disgusts you?
Personally I find it to be an intriguing way to pay people for the work that they actually do without supporting a greedy middleman.

Re:So... redundant, in other words

[TheCarp]

Which is interesting because, while I share the disgust in theory, I don't actually know much about the reality and the one time I have seen it before (I wish I could remember where) it was being used by someone who actually was producing serious content, you know, an actual output other than good feelings.

That said, what you describe sounds like about the sort of cult of personality bullshit I expect enough people to fall for as to be able to support some small number of professional loudmouths.

However, I am not sure thats terrible either. Money talks, basically this is a form of grass roots advertising. What fuels them is the perception that signal boosting has value, and well, that is hard to argue with when you see what major corporations are willing to spend on it.

I dunno, as distasteful as I find the idea of throwing cash at someone to rant for me (I provide my rants free of charge as a public service)...its probably more effective than voting.

Re:So... redundant, in other words

[hairyfeet]

While its true that SJWs pretty much ruin everything they touch in the case of Patreon there are just as many using it for good things. For example there are several reviewers of niche movies/TV/Music where you can "buy" an episode and choose the topic of that episode (as long as it falls into the niche) and dedicate it to someone, E.G. Todd In The Shadows has a show called "One Hit Wonderland" where you can choose any one hit band from the past 40 years if you wish to buy an episode. I have seen similar things done with reviews of games like World of Planes/Tanks/Warships where the buyer can choose which vehicle is under review next. Some of these reviewers also sell game time, where the person buying can be in the next review by joining up with the reviewer in game.

In these "works for hire" I see no issue as everybody gets the content for free, the one paying the money simply gets to choose the topic and be mentioned or appear in the video. Watching a few of these other than the person being mentioned in the front you'd be hard pressed to tell this from any of their other content so if it helps them continue to make entertaining videos we can all watch for free? I say go for it, especially when you can use it to help those that could really use it, like Chuck at SFDebris whose wife has a serious mental illness which requires him to be a stay at home dad.

Re:So... redundant, in other words

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Personally, I like Patreon - there are plenty of people out there using it to fund things I enjoy, like webcomics (SMBC is pretty great). I figure if it's something I read pretty regularly, I can throw a buck or two at them every month. Sure, some people use it for things I wouldn't, but if they want to throw money at someone, that's their right.

Re:So... redundant, in other words

[grumbel]

Can you elaborate on why Patreon disgusts you?

I wouldn't call it disgusting, but one problem with a service like Patreon is that it only really works for people who produce regular content updates. So if you are a blogger or Youtube, it can work great, on the other side if you do a create a great single player mod that only gets released once after month of work, it becomes much harder to make money with it. There is also the risk that people that bundle other peoples mods into mod-packs will end up making much more then the people that actual do the mods, as they can produce far more frequent updates and thus gain better visibility.

So there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Patreon, it just has a different set of short comings then one-time-pay-mods.

Frst post

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I can drop vowels too, man! Sprked. Whatever.

Re:Frst post

[Anonymous Coward]

Sporked!

Re:Frst post

[Anonymous Coward]

with ants

I sense disturance in the force

[the.krio]

Law suits coming up.

Re:I sense disturance in the force

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I'd rather have them take 75% of my earnings as a modder than have games so locked up I can't mod them at all

Fucking entitled bitches.

Re:I sense disturance in the force

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you even familiar with the Patreon model?
Basically they ask for money to make something specific, then release it for free. Money is being donated for their time, not for the finished product.

This distinction might not stop a lawsuit, but blame the publisher for that, not the modder.

Re:I sense disturance in the force

[Anonymous Coward]

I am familiar with both Patreon AND the hassle creating derivative works can be if the IP holder is nasty. Patreon is a funding subscription model for either works as they are completed or a monthly donation AND much like Kickstarter there are ZERO guarantees that anybody will deliver anything. You subscribe to people you want to send dollars to, that's all you get

When companies reach out and build a model to let modders make some money off what they're doing without panhandling that's amazing, what sucks is when they do it wrong. From what I understand the three main complaints with Valve's system were:

1. People uploading mods they didn't create
2. Only getting a 25% cut
3. A flood of garbage mods

1 and 3 could be solved by developing a better mod marketplace / community, 2 has no solution

Since Valve's experiment likely cost more than it brought in I doubt we'll see it again for a long time

"Sprked"? How the fuck is that pronounced?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck is "Sprked" supposed to be pronounced?

Sparked?

Sperked?

Spirked?

Sporked?

Spurked?

Spyrked?

Spoorked?

Spearked?

Speerked?

Spraked?

Spreked?

Spriked?

Sproked?

Spruked?

Spryked?

You get the idea.

It's probably the dumbest missing-vowel(s) name I've heard of since Dwolla, which always sounded like doula to me.

Re:"Sprked"? How the fuck is that pronounced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yh. Fck ths vwl-drppng bllsht.

I don't see this working either

[Anonymous Coward]

The first problem is getting people to want to pay for mods. Until people want to pay for mods, everything else like IP owners wanting that money is second.

The second problem is the IP owners wanting that money when people DO pay for mods. And I'm not just talking about Bethseda when someone mods a dragon shaped like a Boeing 747 into Skyrim, if people are being paid for Boeing 747s, Boeing will want a piece of that. Oh, you replaced the woman you screw in game with a model that looks a lot like Sandra Bullock? Don't do that.

The third problem is getting mods people want to pay for, without getting mods that are just going to piss everyone off and get shut down. I'm sure everyone's seen screenshots of the Skyrim mods where nobody wears any clothes. Now make them all 11 years old and try posting that for sale.

If someone is desperate to make this work, what I think might be able to pull it off would be for people to post bounties for certain mods to be made, with restrictions on what can be requested ("no nudity or sex or models of movie stars"). Even then there'd be a huge number of flakes screwing things up, but at least it resolves problem 3 and will quickly discover if there exists people who will solve problem 1 (if the site sits unused for months, the answer is still no, nobody will pay for mods).

To get things started, I'd be willing to pay 5 bucks for someone to mod sea monsters into Windward.

Sporked? Sparked? Sproketed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do word have all these unnecessary "letter" things, let's just get rid of some, it's cool!

TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the company behind Gerry's Mod need to be informed that the TENS OF MILLIONS they have so far earned selling a mod for Valve's most popular games never really happened.

Bethesda's attempt to work with Valve EXPLOITING the long established FREE modding scene for Skyrim famously fell flat on its face, and for a thousand highly predictable reasons. However, Valve ONLY agreed to this partnership because of the very long history of successful PAID mods on Steam. Pain modding works just fine and dandy when the rules are established FROM DAY ONE. Clearly the author of this article thinks you Betas are so dumb and ill-informed, you know nothing about the existing history and success of paid mods.

The ONLY people who jumped on the paid Skyrim bandwagon were authors of mods that depended for 95%+ of their code and other assets from the FREE work of other authors- people who were to be ripped off to the max by the whole scheme. Shysters wanted to spend ten minutes banging out a variation of another person/team's hard work, and then be paid for this 'effort'. Their excuse was that the original authors had not originally charged for their work (because THAT was the form of the original Bethesda license for legal Skyrim mods), so they could STEAL this work, and pass it off as their own.

Bethesda WITHDREW paid Skyrim mods when the legal ramifications became clear. It was Bethesda that had LEGALLY FORCED a modding community to grow up around the idea of free mods. To suddenly imply that CRIMINALS could take that free work, and repackage it for profit was the worst idea EVER.

But Valve has implemented PAID mods properly, with a water-tight legal framework, for a very long time now. And with simply reason- if commercial software can exist, well so can paid mods, since there is no conceptual difference when done correctly. The mod either has to be ALL the author's own work, and/or LEGALLY using licensed work from others.

TL;DR Paid mods on Valve's Steam service != failed Skyrim mods

Re:TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[wierd_w]

I disagree, for a very simple, but very fundamental reason.

Most people wanting to sell their mods, want to get jobs in game development-- Either as asset creators, scripters, coders, level designers, etc.

They use the mod community as the springboard. The easy-access publishing stream through which they are able to shine, and show off their talents to potential employers, who are looking for such premium talent.

When you introduce the paid mods element, the community stops being easy access. People who are supremely talented, but not financially empowered, are unable to showcase that talent effectively.

Additionally, it turns the community into competition to the game designers and publishers, unless draconian IP payouts happen. (like the 75% payout to bethesda that valve had in mind.)

In terms of being able to allow a starry eyed, but highly talented person to get exposure, and thus stand out, and eventually become a professional (by being gainfully employed doing that kind of work), paid mods murder the baby in the cradle.

Re:TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[Darinbob]

And if there is a market for paid mods from day one, there should still be a way to get free mods, a way to bypass the people who treat the community as a resource to be exploited and instead get mods from the people who are a part of the community.

The Steam Workshop was never the real place to get quality mods for Skyrim anyway.

My worry is that the new Bethesda network announced at E3 is a step towards them creating their own mod marketplace, all mods being curated and approved, followed by shutting down places like Nexus as being "unauthorized", so that free mods no long exist.

Sure there are places where paid mods are the norm - but those are also highly toxic places for rather dumb games anyway.

Re:TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[Darinbob]

I've never demanded that other people pay me money to write my resume. So the modders who hope to break the incredibly long odds and get noticed/hired by a game company should not demand that they be paid to do so. (what, maybe less than ten people have ever gotten a a job this way?) Demanding to be paid is an insult to the community also, it implies that the modder is not a part of the community.

The people who are supremely talented but not financially empowered are not my responsibility. I should not be required to give them my charity. I'll pick and choose who I give charity too, and it won't be the guy with the retextured sword. The best mods out there were works from large teams anyway - Unofficial Patches mods (always mandatory), SKUI, SKSE, total world revamps, etc. You don't need finances to be a modder, you just need the game and the (usually) free modding tools; if you think you must have expensive commercial graphics/modeling tools in order to start them you're doing it wrong. Do not treat the gaming community as a way to pay for a bigger computer.

And besides, if someone wants a lot of exposure, the free mods always get the most exposure. Anyone who treats paid mods as more professionally made than free mods is delusional.

Re:TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially considering that the fundamental reason that the mod scenes work so well is that people can take resources from other people's mods (and the original game) and expand on it. When no one can use anyone else's resources (even discounting the quagmire of attribution in the first place), the "scene" falls apart. You turn the people who would have just been normal modders into the "criminals" category you described.

Re:TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[Jumunquo]

So no one should be allowed to make paid mods because some people use it as their "Linked In?" Do you want to ban any professionals to make mods also? There are many good arguments against paid mods, but I'm sorry, this doesn't seem like one of them. You also seem to be missing the fact that most modders make mods first and foremost because they love the game...

Re:TOTAL GARBAGE- paid mods work on Steam

[Mashiki]

Most people wanting to sell their mods, want to get jobs in game development-- Either as asset creators, scripters, coders, level designers, etc.

Pretty much, for those of us who've been modding for ~20 years on a variety of games we do it because we enjoy doing it and don't want to get paid for it. Rather the only application that most of us have is that our work is recognized, used, and enjoyed. A lot of modders start out because there's xyz missing and they want to add it to the game themselves, that's how I got into modding. That, and there were bugs sometimes serious bugs that need to be fixed but weren't fixed by the developer.

People who are talented will get noticed and picked up by the industry by the mods they make. Others use their mods as a showcase, which works out very well too.

It could work, maybe..

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing inherently wrong with paid mods. The problem is the way we think about them. Valve and Bethesda tried to treat them as a form of DLC to monetize for their profit. That predictably exploded in their faces and rightly so. The Patreon model isn't that much different than an MMO subscription. You donate towards the modification/author for additional content, updates, and expanded features on a month to month basis. It might only be a very small amount per person, but it adds up quickly to a reasonable to decent salary for a mod author. ..and that is exactly what you want to see if your favorite game has a deep rich mod community like Skyrim. There were some modifications that weren't updated for a considerable length of time because the updates were non-trivial and involved hard work. Even if someone is passionate about it, there are limits they are willing to go to. Donations can help with that if the community loves it enough to keep it going. There are still plenty of problems to work out and I wish sprked the best with it. I would love to be able to see the community donating to content mods keeping us fresh for years.

Re:It could work, maybe..

[Darinbob]

And yet Linux managed to be built without requiring subscriptions or paid updates. If the community wants something then they will build it even without the funding models.

I don't want a decent salary for a mod author to come from the players, because that implies that the mod author is not a part of the community in the first place. I want mods from part time hobbyists, I don't want more DLCs, I *especially* don't want "Horse Armor" DLCs. Hobbyists promote the community; they say "look what I did", then someone else says "that's great, let me build on that", and the snowball starts rolling and something good can result at the end.

I'm not saying donations are bad - donations are good! I just think mandatory paid mods is a dumb idea. With computing, we've gone decades with working viable open source models in place that have created competitive products to commercial offerings. That open source world has had paid authors, it's had donations, it's had volunteer authors. What is has not had though is people who refuse to work unless the community pays them directly, because it's a community that grew up using sharing as an inherent virtue.

which aims to follow the Patreon support model, bu

[Anonymous Coward]

> which aims to follow the Patreon support model, but exclusively for video game modders.

So... why dont I just use Patreon?

Some mods worth paying for

[phorm]

One thing that comes to mind would be back in the old "Battlefield 1942" days, the "Desert Combat" mod was kick-ass, and the devs who made it put in a lot of work to make it happen. Similarly, things like DOTA actually derive from mods to Starcraft/Warcraft etc.

Some of the mods to Doom also replaced almost everything except the engine.

It would be great if such things are free, but allowing professional modders to gain a little coin isn't. One thing that's sad is the lack of mod-support in many popular games (partly because - I believe - the publisher wants to re-use the engine for sequels will little change, and doesn't want competition).

Re:Some mods worth paying for

[Darinbob]

But these aren't professional modders. They got hired to do more stuff *after* the mods. If they had demanded to be paid up front, those mods would probably not have gotten much traction. The whole point was that now that you've paid $50 for a game, some of your fellow game players have found a way to extend that further. That is, "fellow game players", not "some random guys who want money".

With Doom you had hundreds or thousands of new levels out there, people doing it for free and knowing that they would never be paid or get a job because of that, and they did it anyway. They just wanted to show off what they did, or they wanted to make something fun for other people. But they didn't have the silly attitude that time is money. In fact, Doom had a good model in itself - the first episode, a FULL game was free without the normal guilt trip whine to be paid that most crappy shareware had at the time; only the subsequent episodes were paid and you had plenty of time to do a full and thorough evaluation. Plus you could write your own free levels for this free game. Win, win, win all around.

If the great modders create a great product then they can get donations, just don't require the money to be paid. If they think they're not getting enough in donations then they should reevaluate why they're writing the mods in the first place. If they only create mods to be paid then tough luck, get a better job. But if they create mods to share and to improve the community, then the money shouldn't matter. If they want mandatory paid for mods then they should do it smart - do the Doom way, make the first part great and free, then people who love it will pay for the next parts.

Re:Some mods worth paying for

[rtb61]

The biggest problem of paying for mods is copyright. Modders often borrow from copyrighted content to bring life to other games, often making the game much better with borrowed content than it was without the addition. So the big legal battle would be guaranteed to ensue about what is fair use and what is not fair use. All done for free tends to skirt that issue.

Re:Some mods worth paying for

[phorm]

I think part of the issue is price-point. In the days before DLC, a lot of games came with later "expansion packs" which were essentially a few new levels and some added weapons/units/etc, but essentially the same core experience. Those generally cost less than the initial game, but were still a decent price and often *very* popular (especially Blizzard games such as Brood Wars, Frozen Throne, etc). They weren't much more than mods, albeit by the original publisher.

There were also the unoffical mods such as the aforementioned Desert Combat which - if they made any money - was by donation.

So where does that leave the 3rd-party paid-mod arena. Well, if it requires the original game, then *smart* publishers would put together the fact that "hey, this popular mod is driving extra sales of our game, great!" Some may be want a cut, which may also be something that needs to be worked out. But so long as the price is reasonable, I don't see any reason why a well-done mod would be less popular than an "expansion pack." I probably wouldn't pay $50 for most mods, but $5-20 is still enough to give some devs enough extra cash to make it worth investing the time into making a really polished mod.

Re:Some mods worth paying for

[Darinbob]

Except that in Skyrim there are extremely few mods that would be of that caliber. A few of course, things that are the size of DLC. There are a few mods with new large regions, some are good, some are extremely buggy, none really I would call "great". Even for DLCs I wait until the price drops to $5 anyway. So for one of these large&good mods, the price point would be $1-2. Yet that's what most people were trying to charge for junk and fluff; $0.99 for a retextured sword is stupidly expensive, and yet some people were actually defending this as an appropriate price.

I have 71 mods I've used for Skyrim (none with nudity). Do you really think I should pay $1 or even $0.50 for every single one of them? Added up as a total they do not equal a single game. If they charged, I'd do without the vast majority of them. Ie, windmills have turning blades in a mod, it's nice to have but I'd be stupid to pay for that. Many of them I tried and then after a few minutes uninstalled again as they were nothing like what I expected. Most were the work of big teams of volunteers. Pay for the unofficial patches? Most players would never do that and it would cause the game to get an even worse reputation for buggyness without them. A large chunk of mods were people just trying things out or making something for their own personal use, and just uploading it to Nexus to see if anyone else wanted it. I could do without all of them except the unofficial patches and the SKUI. Charge for mods and the players using mods and the number of mods they try out would shrink by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

What about open source? Should I be paying money for each Linux patch or feature? How would it survive if everyone who wasn't paid took their toys and went home? Even if they charged a small fee the majority of people would never even try it out.

After the paid option went away, some modders said that they could no longer justify the time and expense for modding and were giving up on it. Yet if Valve/Bethesda had never added this option or hinted about it I know that these people would have still been at it, volunteering and doing it for free. That's because they did not do their early modding work with the promise and hope of being paid later; they did it all even though as far as they knew they would never be paid. But have some paid mods for one weekend and take it away, they just packed up and went home like something was stolen from them.

I've paid for Mozilla when that was an option, and people called me stupid at the time for doing it. I've paid for Linux distributions. So my point is not that I want free stuff and want to be a freeloader.

And now for something completely different

[Anonymous Coward]

How about using the Crowd-funded-> Free model?
Crowd fund the development of a component to be freely released.
There are 2 ways to go with this: you could build the component then crowd fund its "release" (like building a spec house) or traditional crowd funding where you make the component after being fully funded.
It would be interesting to see multiple individuals/groups competing for a popular "contract"/fund.

Here's what I see wrong with the idea of paid mods

[wierd_w]

Most mods out there leverage properties produced by other modders. This is because talent takes all kinds of forms. A person who makes gorgeous models may be shit at level design, or may be shit at story telling, or shit at voice acting, or shit at [Insert FOO].

The mod community gets around these individual failings by allowing "Good Story Guy" to leverage "Good script guy" and "Good model guy" and "Good level design guy" to create a mod that tells his epic story, and does so with quality components.

The same is likewise true for good model guy-- who can show off his awesome models with a mod that is worth playing, because it has good story guy's story-- etc...

What happens, fundamentally, when people start planting the :"I WANNA BE PAID!!" flag?

Several things. The obvious one, to me, is this:

In order to successfully monetize a property, then that property must be licensed, and actively policed and controlled. That means that if Good Model Guy says "Hold up, My models are so clearly awesome, that you have to pay me $BAR percentage of your gross if you sell your mod, and it features my models." Suddenly, Good Story Guy can no longer get his epic story out in a presentable container. His talent dies on the vine, because once he has done the math, and computed all the nickles and dimes he has to pay everyone to satisfy all their egos (which is really what this is about.) he either has nothing left, or worse, is actually in the hole, financially. This is simply due to all the overhead costs needed to properly attempt to license the properties, the costs of utilizing an IP lawyer to assure legitimacy of the licenses, etc. The ability of Good Story Guy to shine vaporize.

The same is true for Good Model Guy, who now has to license the level design skills of Good Level Design Guy, and the story of Good Story Guy, etc.

To me, wishing to be able to monetize your hobby/labor of love is like wishing that you had a magical castle. Boy, it sure would be nice to have, but when you look into it, you find that it just isn't really possible, and still have the community. You take what was once something with practically no barrier to entry other than your own talent that you can bring to the table, and overnight, you end up with a byzantine network of licenses so complex that you WILL need a lawyer to keep it all straight.

So, let me ask you-- Can you afford the services of a lawyer? All the time?

That's what going outside the "handouts" model *WILL* necessitate.

Either to help you draft your license to that it is sane and useful by other people (so you dont shoot yourself in the food), and just to make sure that any project that you arent the 100% rights holder to has properly licensed all of the properties that it leverages.

Paid mods outside of the donations-based model are simply, and fundamentally incompatible with the foundational bedrock of the mod community: The ability to leverage one's own talents with the combined talent pool of all other modders, to make something new and awesome, and do so without excessive barrier to entry.

At "best", "License based" mods would splinter the community into closely knit consortia, where you have "elite" (with HUGE barrier to entry) individuals that routinely license each other's properties at reduced, or even free rates, to produce community mods that they then share the proceeds from, based on some internal agreements. Such pools will stagnate, since no new blood can easily enter (because they cant showcase their own talent easily, due to the barrier to entry caused by the licensing model itself) and so such communities are doomed to slow death from entropy. (People change careers, get married and or have kids, anything that takes them away from their group, without ready replacements to take over.)

So, as harsh as it sounds, I equate "I WANNA BE PAID!" with "I WANT A MAGIC CASTLE!"

Money Ruins Fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget the elephant in the room here, when money comes into play in a previously non/minimal-profit, hobbyist environment, it immediately changes the vibe to cut-throat capitalism. On top of this, money is like chum in the water, capitalists that otherwise would have previously nothing to do with the hobby will smell that money and come flooding into the scene, these people don't know the people, they have no grasp of the culture, they don't know the history, and they don't care to learn. The only thing these people care about is profit, and as such, the hobby will crash and burn in the face of profit. And the worst part? The hobbyists will sit by and let it happen, because of money.

I'm not being hyperbolic, I've seen this happen before, I'm seeing it happen now to a current hobby of mine, and I'm bracing for it to happen to modding.

Re:Money Ruins Fun

[Darinbob]

It did happen to Skyrim. Some modders left forever because of it. They weren't paid for a long time, then one weekend they thought they were going to get paid, the community exploded, the promise of payment vanished, and then they took their toys and went home never to return. On the other side, some players also decided to never use a mod again, being just as petty as the other side. It honestly did feel like chum in the water, the level of malice rising so fast was amazing. I think most people never really got their views across so that others could understand it because there were so many insults flying and any reasonable views were buried in the threads.

Re:Money Ruins Fun

[Mashiki]

It doesn't help that a lot of those pay-for modders, started lashing out at those of us modders who wanted nothing to do with it. That's probably the biggest thing there, if you have access to any of the hidden forums for modders on the mod sites(nexus, moddb, modgames, etc), you'd see the personal attacks that the paid for modding used. Once that started making it out into the general community that pay-for modders were attacking others for not wanting it, the community in general had enough.

Those folks learned the hard way that it's really easy to burn bridges by attacking other content creators, and pissing off mod users.

Re:which aims to follow the Patreon support model,

[Darinbob]

Or kickstarter.

If a mod is worth $$$ then...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it seems to me that it would be picked up by a corp and made into an official addon or even a spinoff game, e.g. DayZ, Teamfortress, several NWN modules, etc.

Many games also prohibit charging for mods(commercializing), but apparently that's changing and TBH I've seen VERY FEW mods that I'd be willing to pay anything for. Most are pretty trivial and/or low quality.