The creator of the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod CD Projekt recently hit with a DMCA strike has paused his Patreon page and pulled access to all his mods after receiving another strike from a different publisher.
Looks like the Ghostrunner developers also have an issue with paid mods running off their IP.
dependencies are a common practice in modding. they allow for modularized packaging of software, making maintenance easier for devs, and content choices easier for users. win-win.
paid mods hinder this by incentivizing modders to put frameworks - which would be the most profitable - behind paywalls.
low effort slop:
see the horse armor bullshit, or any other time bethesda tried to introduce paid mods, including creation club (which is literally paid mods). every time this happened the “stores” got flooded with low effort, low quality, but super expensive bullshit.
this then buried high quality content under mountains of shit, made worse by rampant bot abuse and algorithm manipulation.
this is the obvious result of paywalls in modding: when it’s not about passion, it’s about money. and when it’s about money, there is no low that sellers won’t sink to.
incompatibilities:
with paywalls in place modders will actively seek to interfere and break other mods. this has already happened in free modding, also many times, but that were either instances of egotistical infighting between modders, or straight-up malware deployments.
what’s different when mods are paid, is that there is a financial incentive to build a walled garden. to build a system of software only compatible with your own creations, and nobody else’s, so users can’t mix and match and have no choice about where to buy from.
this alone would effectively end modding entirely.
cost:
paywalls would be stupidly expensive. again, the best (or rather worst) example of this is bethesda. CC content is stupidly overpriced, and at the same time lower quality than what is available for free. the cost alone is so absurd, that it would definitely destroy the entire community of any game that implemented paywalls, because, again, the incentives align to encourage high prices to target whales instead of normal users. this is the case for every single paywall in gaming, and it certainly applies to modding.
and more:
paywalls in modding are a legal nightmare. I’m not a fan of the current copyright system, but at least right now modders don’t have much incentive to enforce their IP with DRM tools. paywalls mean there would definitely be DRM tools in mods.
apart from that there’s also the issue of law itself. in the EU for example the return policy for digital goods would probably force some kind of compliance check into any software that tried to do paywalls for mods outside of the original companies stores; that’s why bethesda only sells on internal stores. that and vendor lock-in.
vendor lock-in itself would be catastrophic for many communities. this would basically mean that some company controls all aspects of modding, including what content you’re allowed to create. so say goodbye to anything credit card companies, i.e. the U.S., doesn’t like, because all of that is immediately forbidden.
remember the porn ban credit card companies tried to enforce on steam and itch.io a couple months back? that’s a guaranteed scenario for paywalled mods. someone has to handle the “pay” part of the paywall, and credit card companies will enforce their weird moral guidelines on everyone if paywalls become a thing.
any single one of these would ruin a community.
and you seriously couldn’t even come up with a single one?
Well, I doubt frameworks would become for-pay. There are not enough modders to sell to for that to be a realistic business model.
I expect most mods would not be paid. There is a thriving community of modders who make things without charging a cent. Why would this paid VR mod change that? I expect most mods are not worth paying for. But I could imagine, say, paying for a very high quality mod, like a set of well-reviewed and cohesive portal map packs.
As for slop, I will point out that there is a LOT of slop in mods. I mean just look at how many low-effort sprite hack mods of sonic there are. Nonetheless, I concede that with a monetary incentive, passionless money-seekers will be attracted to the market to sell slop. However, that is the state of many markets already; so why do you insist mods specifically must be protected? Pick a lane – either oppose capitalism everywhere, or accept that people can sell software modifications.
As for corporate shoe leather – back off, please. I’m not trying to start a fight. I hate big corporations more than most. But the big guys don’t get a cent from somebody’s 3rd party VR mod.
none of that is how this actually works in practice.
again, all of this has happened before, and I’ve laid out how it turned out.
there’s no “maybe”, no “perhaps”, no “possibly” about any of this.
the reason it can’t happen, is because corpos will not ever allow a secondary market to form around their IP. because that would mean less profit for them. in the corpo mindset any profit someone else makes off their IP is profit stolen from them. it’s bullshit, of course, but that’s how it is.
why do you think ALL of the paid mods are only ever available in in-game stores that the company controls?
there is no scenario under capitalism where a corporation allows random people to make money off of their property. zero chance for that.
Well, I doubt frameworks would become for-pay. There are not enough modders to sell to for that to be a realistic business model.
there definitely are enough modders around to sell frameworks to:
Script extenders for literally all fallout and elder scrolls games, highlander in games like xcom(2) and ark, vanilla expanded framework in rimworld, cyberpunk has the atelier store and a couple others, various modloaders like forge, neo-forge, and fabric for Minecraft, and on and on the list goes.
there’s potentially millions of “customers”. (in quotes, because without frameworks almost nothing works)
all you need to do to see how ignorant of a comment you made is go on nexusmods and check the skyrim pages for most downloaded/unique downloaded. the top 5 alone are:
6 Million (Framework/Utility/QoL)
5.9 Million (Patch)
4.9 Million (Utility)
4.3 Million (Framework)
4.0 Million (Graphics)
that’s just a single game, and a single platform. there’s many more platforms and modding communities out there. that’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here. and we haven’t even looked at Minecraft yet, definitely the biggest!
I expect most mods would not be paid. There is a thriving community of modders who make things without charging a cent. Why would this paid VR mod change that? I expect most mods are not worth paying for. But I could imagine, say, paying for a very high quality mod, like a set of well-reviewed and cohesive portal map packs.
i touched on that in the first few paragraphs, but that’s the core of the issue right here:
this is NOT a free and open market!
if paid mods become a thing, you will not (legally) have the choice “just not pay”. it will be either you pay, or you get no mods. this isn’t even a question, of course that’s what would happen, because bethesda tried to do exactly that, at least twice already, and it’s been a catastrophic failure every time!
on top of that, the mod creators would be paid next to nothing anyway, because now they would need to be paid by the company that owns the store, and they obviously don’t want to pay a fair value for their labor, and will instead squeeze every damn cent out of modders. of course this won’t go over well for most of the truly talented modders, so slop is all that’s left in the end.
this is all just simple enshittification, like with everything else.
As for slop, I will point out that there is a LOT of slop in mods. I mean just look at how many low-effort sprite hack mods of sonic there are. Nonetheless, I concede that with a monetary incentive, passionless money-seekers will be attracted to the market to sell slop. However, that is the state of many markets already; so why do you insist mods specifically must be protected? Pick a lane – either oppose capitalism everywhere, or accept that people can sell software modifications.
i have picked a lane here: free and open modding. never changed my mind about that. and definitely yes on the oppose capitalism everywhere part. of course that’s the lane i pick, why would you assume otherwise?
current slop in mods is harmless, because users get to choose to use it or not. there’s alternatives.
with paid mods incentivizing companies to remove that choice, slop is all that is left!
As for corporate shoe leather – back off, please. I’m not trying to start a fight. I hate big corporations more than most. But the big guys don’t get a cent from somebody’s 3rd party VR mod.
yeah, alright, that was a bit far and unnecessary. sorry about that.
still, why would you be so hell-bent to open the doors to enshittification of an entire hobby for the sole reason of profit and think that’s a good idea? name one hobby that got better for the community when payment got involved!? because i sure can’t think of any!
are you serious?
fragmentation:
dependencies are a common practice in modding. they allow for modularized packaging of software, making maintenance easier for devs, and content choices easier for users. win-win.
paid mods hinder this by incentivizing modders to put frameworks - which would be the most profitable - behind paywalls.
low effort slop:
see the horse armor bullshit, or any other time bethesda tried to introduce paid mods, including creation club (which is literally paid mods). every time this happened the “stores” got flooded with low effort, low quality, but super expensive bullshit.
this then buried high quality content under mountains of shit, made worse by rampant bot abuse and algorithm manipulation.
this is the obvious result of paywalls in modding: when it’s not about passion, it’s about money. and when it’s about money, there is no low that sellers won’t sink to.
incompatibilities:
with paywalls in place modders will actively seek to interfere and break other mods. this has already happened in free modding, also many times, but that were either instances of egotistical infighting between modders, or straight-up malware deployments.
what’s different when mods are paid, is that there is a financial incentive to build a walled garden. to build a system of software only compatible with your own creations, and nobody else’s, so users can’t mix and match and have no choice about where to buy from.
this alone would effectively end modding entirely.
cost:
paywalls would be stupidly expensive. again, the best (or rather worst) example of this is bethesda. CC content is stupidly overpriced, and at the same time lower quality than what is available for free. the cost alone is so absurd, that it would definitely destroy the entire community of any game that implemented paywalls, because, again, the incentives align to encourage high prices to target whales instead of normal users. this is the case for every single paywall in gaming, and it certainly applies to modding.
and more:
paywalls in modding are a legal nightmare. I’m not a fan of the current copyright system, but at least right now modders don’t have much incentive to enforce their IP with DRM tools. paywalls mean there would definitely be DRM tools in mods.
apart from that there’s also the issue of law itself. in the EU for example the return policy for digital goods would probably force some kind of compliance check into any software that tried to do paywalls for mods outside of the original companies stores; that’s why bethesda only sells on internal stores. that and vendor lock-in.
vendor lock-in itself would be catastrophic for many communities. this would basically mean that some company controls all aspects of modding, including what content you’re allowed to create. so say goodbye to anything credit card companies, i.e. the U.S., doesn’t like, because all of that is immediately forbidden.
remember the porn ban credit card companies tried to enforce on steam and itch.io a couple months back? that’s a guaranteed scenario for paywalled mods. someone has to handle the “pay” part of the paywall, and credit card companies will enforce their weird moral guidelines on everyone if paywalls become a thing.
any single one of these would ruin a community.
and you seriously couldn’t even come up with a single one?
how high on corporate shoe leather are you?
Well, I doubt frameworks would become for-pay. There are not enough modders to sell to for that to be a realistic business model.
I expect most mods would not be paid. There is a thriving community of modders who make things without charging a cent. Why would this paid VR mod change that? I expect most mods are not worth paying for. But I could imagine, say, paying for a very high quality mod, like a set of well-reviewed and cohesive portal map packs.
As for slop, I will point out that there is a LOT of slop in mods. I mean just look at how many low-effort sprite hack mods of sonic there are. Nonetheless, I concede that with a monetary incentive, passionless money-seekers will be attracted to the market to sell slop. However, that is the state of many markets already; so why do you insist mods specifically must be protected? Pick a lane – either oppose capitalism everywhere, or accept that people can sell software modifications.
As for corporate shoe leather – back off, please. I’m not trying to start a fight. I hate big corporations more than most. But the big guys don’t get a cent from somebody’s 3rd party VR mod.
no, just no.
none of that is how this actually works in practice.
again, all of this has happened before, and I’ve laid out how it turned out.
there’s no “maybe”, no “perhaps”, no “possibly” about any of this.
the reason it can’t happen, is because corpos will not ever allow a secondary market to form around their IP. because that would mean less profit for them. in the corpo mindset any profit someone else makes off their IP is profit stolen from them. it’s bullshit, of course, but that’s how it is.
why do you think ALL of the paid mods are only ever available in in-game stores that the company controls?
there is no scenario under capitalism where a corporation allows random people to make money off of their property. zero chance for that.
there definitely are enough modders around to sell frameworks to:
Script extenders for literally all fallout and elder scrolls games, highlander in games like xcom(2) and ark, vanilla expanded framework in rimworld, cyberpunk has the atelier store and a couple others, various modloaders like forge, neo-forge, and fabric for Minecraft, and on and on the list goes.
there’s potentially millions of “customers”. (in quotes, because without frameworks almost nothing works)
all you need to do to see how ignorant of a comment you made is go on nexusmods and check the skyrim pages for most downloaded/unique downloaded. the top 5 alone are:
that’s just a single game, and a single platform. there’s many more platforms and modding communities out there. that’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here. and we haven’t even looked at Minecraft yet, definitely the biggest!
i touched on that in the first few paragraphs, but that’s the core of the issue right here:
this is NOT a free and open market!
if paid mods become a thing, you will not (legally) have the choice “just not pay”. it will be either you pay, or you get no mods. this isn’t even a question, of course that’s what would happen, because bethesda tried to do exactly that, at least twice already, and it’s been a catastrophic failure every time!
on top of that, the mod creators would be paid next to nothing anyway, because now they would need to be paid by the company that owns the store, and they obviously don’t want to pay a fair value for their labor, and will instead squeeze every damn cent out of modders. of course this won’t go over well for most of the truly talented modders, so slop is all that’s left in the end.
this is all just simple enshittification, like with everything else.
i have picked a lane here: free and open modding. never changed my mind about that. and definitely yes on the oppose capitalism everywhere part. of course that’s the lane i pick, why would you assume otherwise?
current slop in mods is harmless, because users get to choose to use it or not. there’s alternatives.
with paid mods incentivizing companies to remove that choice, slop is all that is left!
yeah, alright, that was a bit far and unnecessary. sorry about that.
still, why would you be so hell-bent to open the doors to enshittification of an entire hobby for the sole reason of profit and think that’s a good idea? name one hobby that got better for the community when payment got involved!? because i sure can’t think of any!