Selling mods? Thread

The thread is inspired by the recent Minecraft "news" (or a little piece of nightmare very smartly packaged and ready to be served):
Moddb.com

To bring some comments into attention:

macacos2 wrote: Sorry, I kind of snapped as I watched a pointless game like this sell so much and still want more by selling the work of other people, destroying the ideology of mods I know them.

Just to let you guys know, I bought this game to play with a couple of friends and I completely regret doing so.

Theon wrote: Paying to be able to mod? (Glad you had the common courtesy to retract that!)
Retain the right to steal any mod and incorporate it in Minecraft??
Selling and buying mods???

WTF am I reading!?
Mojang has become the Activision of indies.

I'm glad there is still the Wolfire Team, or I would've lost faith in humanity.

And what do you think? And there's a huge difference between making mods games and selling them, and selling mods themselves, especially total conversions while still requiring the user to own the commercial game.

Should mods (any) requiring the game that you still need to pay for, be sold?

Edited by: feillyne

It's a clever way for the company that owns the game to make "Downloadable content" and get money, while doing absolute jackshit.

(Soon an idiot is gonna show up and say that modders should start charging for their work due to the effort, completely ignoring the fact that mods have been free since they were first invented. Just wait.)

While accepting donations is one thing, charging for use is another.

Edited by: macacos2

Yea wasn't there something in the mod tools for dragon age: origins that said Bioware has the right to use any user-created content without the creators permission?

Didn't Blizzard announce ages ago that the best Starcraft 2 mods will be sold? I suppose they are hoping another DotA comes along.

I support the move, I mean obviously there will be tons of free content, but for some of the high quality stuff it is win/win for the developer. I mean people pay money for hats... why is buying an awesome fully fledged mod and helping a hard working developer so bad?

Paying to mod is just a big no to me. Glad he removed that but its doesnt make me feel happy that he even tryied it.

Paying for mods doesnt feel right, even donations seem fishy.
The donating to get early version of mods doesnt feel right either. It's almost like putting pressure on people to donate then more than a reward, sure you dont have to, but then you dont have to buy things either.

On the other hand things like the Polycount pack I felt where a nice idea, modders could get some cash for there work.
I can see more stuff like this being done for Portal 2, sorta like a mini store for user content in game.(Just a hunch)

Gah, im still not sure where I stand.

Edited by: Ark_

INtense! wrote: I mean dumb people pay money for hats...

fix'd

I would never pay for a mod. Unless it is something like what the zps and aoc team have done were theyve created a mod and given the community loads of content then made there next game indie. What ever happened to modding as a hobby and that alone?

I believe alot of the modders are working on indie games these days due to the engine selection (unity, udk, cryengine, ogre), so you are going to be paying for their work anyhow.

Either way i'd say modding will for the most part remain 99% free. It will just be the occasional one like CS, DotA, Killing Floor that go commerical, how is this any different?

I think the problem wasn't so much that modders would be getting paid, rather people were going to have to PAY to be giving rights to mod. I don't think modding should be something we're expected to pay extra for. I think Notch made a mistake by referring those people as "modders" I would have classed it as 2 different types of modders, one that release mods for free, and "Partners" which develop content to be sold as DLC... since really that's what the idea is.. its not a mod, its DLC. I do see what Notch's intention was... but his wording was very stupid. I would have thought with all the money they have they could take time on these sorts of decisions.

I think there needs to be CLEAR distinction between what exactly we're talking about here.. Paid content development is DLC, NOT modding, Modding is always the act of modifying something with the intention of distributing it free of charge. If you're going to charge for it, then you're a 3rd Party Developer and are not allowed to be considered a modder.

Notch definitely though in my eyes has lost some respect from me. Asking people pay for the right to mod is not on.

Should point out this bit:

Notch wrote: We want to buy and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them
ourselves.

So yeah they're not mods, his terminology is wrong. You can't "License" a mod, if you did.. it would become a "Stand Alone Product" or "Downloadable Content" requiring an existing product.

Further reading, Notch's plan was to program an API for Minecraft and then sell it to modders, this is wrong, his justification is that it would make sure no one could screw up the base product.. but that's not entirely true either, it comes down to the sort of mods you're downloading, obviously bad mods won't be used. I think he's thinking too much about ways to prevent problems many other developers have.. when really he should just let them happen, people honestly won't care, he's worrying too much. People should be allowed to make what ever they want yes.. if there's truly something good out there then Notch should license it and take exclusive rights on future updates of that mod- this would then force people to buy it if they wanted to keep using it outside of the free version that was already out there.

Someone wrote: I mean people pay money for hats...

easily the worst thing valve has ever done. All that praise people gave about TF2 support being free and then they do that.. lol

Edited by: formerlyknownasMrCP

INtense! wrote: I believe alot of the modders are working on indie games these days due to the engine selection (unity, udk, cryengine, ogre), so you are going to be paying for their work anyhow.

Independent titles are not Mods. They're most of the time a new game on the same engine.

Charging money for a game you made using the Source Engine =/= Charging money for some changes you made on Half-life 2.

macacos2 wrote:

INtense! wrote: I believe alot of the modders are working on indie games these days due to the engine selection (unity, udk, cryengine, ogre), so you are going to be paying for their work anyhow.

Independent titles are not Mods. They're most of the time a new game on the same engine.

Charging money for a game you made using the Source Engine =/= Charging money for some changes you made on Half-life 2.

If valve allows it why not? The thing that gets me is some peoples sense of entitlement. For example if you think the latest release of the m&b expansion is a rip of and should be free, don't bitch about it people spend time making the game.

As for the minecraft thing if notch wants to allow people to sell modifications that are not apart of the official game that is his solution. There was a fantastic twitter response by the man that had someone replying to him making a bot to delete emails saying that is a good use of my $15usd, notch replied with you didn't pay for my time, you paid for minecraft.

My thoughts, if people want to make a bit of money off their hobby, if they want to move into the realm of actual development, if they want to sell their work I say they should. If you are getting all riled up, settle down, unbunch your panties and put your money were your mouth is. If you don't want to support the developer dont play the game.

...or actually come up with an alternative method that lets someone devote full-time hours to games development and still have funds to pay for food and bills. It's too fucking easy to say things should be free when it isn't you that will end up in the unheated building living off packet noodles if you can't make money off it.

Someone wrote: For example if you think the latest release of the m&b expansion is a rip of and should be free, don't bitch about it people spend time making the game.

In all fairness though, $15 is a bit much since Warband itself was $20 if you pre-ordered it and the original was $15 if you picked it up during Beta. For what you're getting Warband had a lot of features that were really badly needed for mount and blade.. Fire and Sword however inherits a lot of issues from Warband. It would've been nice to have seen those issues fixed, because Taleworlds has ignored them for too long I feel and it would've been nice to see a thrid party attempt something new.. sure the non-linear quests definitely are new.. but there's not enough there to make me overlook the glaring problems inherited from Warband. Hence why I'm skipping it. With that said though, Mount and Blade is really an epic game.

I'm certainly not against people making money from 3rd part development. I don't think Notch should charge for the SDK itself, rather for a commercial license- If he'd said that, no one would have cared. But because he specifically mentions paying for the privilege of having a mod SDK its creating this idea that no matter what, you have to pay if you want to edit the game. That's not cool, they can do it now for free anyway, all they should pay for is the license to make money from the product.

I'm a supporter however of seeing 3rd party developers as a final stop for aspiring modders, they should be able to make money off their work if its popular, but they shouldn't have to pay for the tools- this is where I think Unity, UDK and now CryEngine had the right idea and he should follow their model.

Edited by: formerlyknownasMrCP

Henley wrote:
As for the minecraft thing if notch wants to allow people to sell modifications...

Somebiggot wrote:
"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us
• The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
• We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community

"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

AKA we get all the money and credit for your work and bring more people into OUR game.
You know the "wolf mob" they just added into that game? It was made by a community member. Do you know who he is?
Me neither.
Go Mojang and Mod shops!

A separate licence is needed, because each developer makes his own commercial mod and sells it more or less on his own (apart from on the Minecraft website and official promotion of a supposed paid mod). That's rather understandable.

The only problem is that you need to pay for the original game and any high quality commercial mods (DLC, whatever), so you pay double.

Mods themselves serve promotional purposes, and through it, the commercial ones. Somebody makes mods for your commercial games thus promoting them - your game sales increase. And now, Minecraft dev(s) comes in and additionally charges for any extra HQ content. You no longer buy a game just for the sake of (free HQ) mods - you buy a game to pay even more... frankly, it reminds of something. Ah, MMO.

Edited by: feillyne

macacos2 wrote:

Henley wrote:
As for the minecraft thing if notch wants to allow people to sell modifications...

Somebiggot wrote:
"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us
• The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
• We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community

"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

AKA we get all the money and credit for your work and bring more people into OUR game.
You know the "wolf mob" they just added into that game? It was made by a community member. Do you know who he is?
Me neither.
Go Mojang and Mod shops!

So don't develop for it then if you know the rules. People will make mods for that game because they want their ideas to be apart of the game. Not because they want to become famous or rich. I'm sure the people who made the mods where either compensated or where asked if they were ok with it being apart of the game.

Henley wrote:

macacos2 wrote:

Henley wrote:
As for the minecraft thing if notch wants to allow people to sell modifications...

Somebiggot wrote:
"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us
• The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
• We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community

"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

AKA we get all the money and credit for your work and bring more people into OUR game.
You know the "wolf mob" they just added into that game? It was made by a community member. Do you know who he is?
Me neither.
Go Mojang and Mod shops!

So don't develop for it then if you know the rules. People will make mods for that game because they want their ideas to be apart of the game. Not because they want to become famous or rich. I'm sure the people who made the mods where either compensated or where asked if they were ok with it being apart of the game.

There's a world of difference between creating mods to be part of the game (with no expectation of fame or profit), and creating mods for a game the owners of which explicit state they intend to steal your work.

yuk, what a #@1~

mSparks wrote:

Henley wrote:

macacos2 wrote:

Henley wrote:
As for the minecraft thing if notch wants to allow people to sell modifications...

Somebiggot wrote:
"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us
• The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
• We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community

"The rules of the license deal will contain:

• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

AKA we get all the money and credit for your work and bring more people into OUR game.
You know the "wolf mob" they just added into that game? It was made by a community member. Do you know who he is?
Me neither.
Go Mojang and Mod shops!

So don't develop for it then if you know the rules. People will make mods for that game because they want their ideas to be apart of the game. Not because they want to become famous or rich. I'm sure the people who made the mods where either compensated or where asked if they were ok with it being apart of the game.

There's a world of difference between creating mods to be part of the game (with no expectation of fame or profit), and creating mods for a game the owners of which explicit state they intend to steal your work.

yuk, what a #@1~

Ah no, if everyone knows about the mod terms the people who do not want the work to be used wont advertise it. People who make these mods and make the popular ones post it so others can use it. If you dont post it then no one will know about it.

It really depends on the support , personally id buy a mod sdk for a game I love and wanted to mod with lots of support.
however keep in mind any mod worth having... It takes years of work by several people
Why should the good modder's be penalised for wanting a SDK that makes the developer Content they can use ?
So perhaps they will refund the startup cost to popular mods that people have made then perhaps better content will ensue.
but lets be realistic If i got two games I love and one has a free sdk why would i choose to mod for the one that is paid for.
All they will do is moved good modder's away from their games and onto the competitors product.
As for charging for a mod... well that could have problems for the copyright issues...
you'd be surprised whats involved legally and how liable mod creators can actually be once money comes into play.
Donations for mod teams may dodge this issue however they may also get trapped by government rules.

Mods by the developers of the game (often DLC´s) can be sold, but I think it´s horrible to pay for a DLC if you bought the game for 60 Euros (or Dollars). If someone developes a mod who don´t was involved in the team, selling a mod probably means copyright trouble. Selling mods for open source games is the worst you can do, because it would be unfair to charge a mod for a free game.

John_Harrison wrote: Selling mods for open source games is the worst you can do, because it would be unfair to charge a mod for a free game..

Well, the makers of the open-source game got to profit somehow. The "game" is free afterall. Asking for donations usually f*cks things up because only non-profit organizations (like charities) can ask for that, I believe.

I think it's much much more worse if you pay €60,00 for a full product and have DLC shoved down your throat for only more €19,99
Specially when the DLC could've been easily included in the full thing.

Edited by: macacos2

John_Harrison wrote: Selling mods for open source games is the worst you can do, because it would be unfair to charge a mod for a free game.

macacos2 wrote: Well, the makers of the open-source game got to profit somehow. The "game" is free afterall. Asking for donations usually f*cks things up because only non-profit organizations (like charities) can ask for that, I believe.

Which open-source & free games? In fact, you can sell GPLed games and GPL derivative works (mods including) even if somebody else was the main developer of them. GPL licence not only lets you sell (distribute) a game for whatever price you'd like, but also allows you to pirate commercial products that were GPLed - legally.

GPL (most open-source games):
allowed to run (even if somebody pays for the product, then distribute it for free elsewhere), forbidden only to remove the licence notice & distribute derivative products without having them GPLed as well.

You can google for "GPL myths".