Comments - IGN_Hegemon

*laugh* all of a sudden people found my profile... Thanks for the welcome :)

Yea this was the guy in the front lobby of E3.

-Scott

I wanted to throw in my two cents on this interesting article. The idea of selling a mod is enticing but impractical for many developers, due to budget requirements and technological restraints. If you sell a mod, you will be expected to have servers running for people to play on. You also have income and that open you up to lawsuits and so many other fun experiences like taxes. You would also need to securing your mod and assets, which is not easy to do since most mods don't have a executable required to run the mod content.

What many modders fail to realize is that they are creating a brand when creating and promoting a mod. This brand could be turned into a stand alone retail game that already has market awareness and a community of players. You have the best of both worlds of game development, not only do you get to test and refine your concept, you have sites like ModDB, Fileplanet, Planet sites, and many others to build your community every time you put out news or file release. This builds your core audience which is invaluable to your project if you develop a stand alone version of your mod. The other great benefit is from day one of developing your stand alone title, you have something to show the press, giving you another decisive advantage over traditional game developers.

There is definitely money out there for quality games, it just takes time and dedication to reach the point of making money.

-Scott

Scott Miller
Mod Manager
IGN Entertainment Inc.
www.fileplanet.com
smiller@ign.com

Hi Derrck,

I wanted to respond to your comments,

1. Yes I was talking about multiplayer mods as they do seem to be the most common mod that I see.
2. Taxes, Lawsuits, Incorporation, Business Licenses, etc are facts of life when starting a business. There is more to selling products online than just accepting money, you also have to look at state sales taxes, supporting the product, providing refunds and returns etc. We (in the US) all know how quickly some people will sue over very small matters such as not getting their game on time or a refund quick enough. You also must consider that mods are typically not made by a single person. Quite often there is a whole team of people who must be paid, which then makes the leader not only responsible for the tax burden (assuming they don't incorporate), but also paying people. If you pay someone over a specific amount per year ($500??) you also must provide them with income information at the end of the year. What happens if you sell the IP/Brand? I could fill this page with what if's, but what it boils down to is that there is a lot of planning required to run a business on top of developing your mod.
3. Having legal rights is great and all, but I was talking more about piracy than anything. Since most mods are folders with data in them, it is very hard to secure the mod and make it hard to pirate if it were sold.
4. Getting some press is easy, getting lots of good press isn't.
5. Fileplanet doesn't require a subscription to download anything. Anyone can access the site and download files. The subscription is an added value for people who want to take part in our exclusive promotions, also I would like to point out that a year subscription works out to be 3.33 a month :P

But this isn't a recruitment special for FilePlanet, I never said you shouldn't sell your work. What I did point out was the difficulties of doing so. There are numerous problems to contend with, beyond the EULA issues mentioned in the article that developers should be aware of before even considering selling their mod.

-Scott

Scott Miller
Mod Manager
IGN Entertainment Inc.
www.fileplanet.com
smiller@ign.com