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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.
Yeah, I can drop vowels too, man! Sprked. Whatever.
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
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen