Mod Market

I think you're forgetting the obvious here and in a rather clumbsy way.

putting aside the fact I hate DLCs as much as the next guy and moving on to the core of the topic, stay with me, stay with me. *snap* **snap**
DLCs are made by paid employees of the same company actually working on the game at the time. DLCs are actually the full game split into paying packages to get more money.

MODS .....on the other hand are EXTRA content for the FULL and COMPLETED game, NOT made by the devs but made by private parties, often lone individuals NOT PAID by anyone for their content or work.

I see a few differences here. do you?

making mods paying may influence the mod scene (good or bad debate set aside) but not the game's develeopment nor it's content. Do mods COME with the game? no. are they a part of the game? no. they are optional choices of extras from a non-official source that you may use at your own discretion. paying for them or not in the case of UI mods does NOT change the content of the game for other parties. paying or not in the case of non UI mods only afflicts the group of users who all own the mod and are playing together affecting other parties in no way.

I fail to grasp your link (or comparison?) between DLC and mods, you'll forgive me.

one could as well compare evolve and PA on an FPS's scale. or the same but on an RTS's scale.

Perhaps they should just sell it as a sequal then?

You have to pay.. For MORE stuff? What kind of travesty is this?! /s

You're being ridiculous, of course you need to pay when new things are made, consider this. The content is made _after_ the game was released, heck maybe they didn't even know if a dlc was viable until after the game was sold.

DLC is one of the best things ever, it keeps games and even companies from dying, not too mention keeps things fresh. Adding new things to play around with for a moderate fee. Like a map pack for Halo, or a whole new quest line in Fallout- Skyrim! Heck if the Core Contingency was created today it'd have been a DLC pack.

What will never happen? A mod marketplace?

It may, again the devs have thought about it in the past. I even gave a quote from Garat about it.

Let's make sure we distinguish between Day-1 DLC, which is indeed just splitting content for more money (BAD) vs additional content made later (GOOD).

Theseeker very clearly said he doesn't like DLC. Period.

Raevn brings up some very good points here which I have to agree with.

As a mod developer I'm going to bring up a few more points as to why having a paid for mod market is leaning towards being a bad idea.
People will often reference games like TF2 where they have a community market for custom stuff, but what they fail to acknowledge is that "most" of the content present there is made by a single individual so the money would just go straight to them and valve. If you look at a game like PA there arent many mods created and maintained by a single individual, many of the mods in the PA scene are worked on by small teams.

Since I'm one of the Orbital Warfare devs, I will be using our team as an example for why a paid marketplace will not be overly beneficial. Lets say that PA had a mod marketplace and we decided to put Orbital Warfare Overhaul in that market for lets say $10. How would that money be split within our team of 5? and remember to take into consideration that many more people have contributed to the mod at some point. I'm going to be using myself and Emraldis in this example.

Emraldis is our main coder and I am the 3D model artist for the mod. Do we split the earnings evenly between us? or will the argument of "I've done more than you and my tasks are harder so in the end I deserve more of the cut" pop up? (I am not insinuating that our team is like this, this is purely a made up scenario).

Who is the judge as to who deserves more of the cut. 3D modelling is quite the task and quite time consuming, but coding is similarly time consuming and has its fair share of problems. The mod would not exist without either of us, but until a person has tried out a certain task, do you trust them to tell you that their job is more difficult/demanding than yours. This is not only an insult to the person that you are claiming does not do as much work, but it is also something that may fracture the team.

Really my argument summarised is that a mod marketplace is good for an environment where there are many individual (single person team) devs (team, fortress hats for example), but in a community like PA where many of our mods are worked on by teams and random contributors this market model would do nothing but fracture the community and result in people not working as teams to bring the community awesome mods like ModX, Statera and Orbital Warfare Overhaul. What we would have is a community of people trying to solo it due to the potential monetary gain which is not good for the devs or the rest of the community.




Hopefully this post is clear and doesn't sound like nonsense, as I am still half asleep.

Everyone could get an equal cut? Or if there was an obvious leader of the group, they would decide who gets what, like a "real" development group/industry.

Yeah, that's assuming everyone in the team in reasonable. Also what about the people who have contributed to the mod every now and then, but aren't full time members of the team?

EDIT:
I personally just don't see this working for many large team cases. I may be wrong, but for now i'll stick to being a bit sceptical.

Its not up to me to decide, that's between the person who offered to help, and the developers. For example many of the admin (and even others) have helped Uber in the past. Quitch for example has helped Sorian with bits of the ai. You don't see him being paid. =P

Expansions are fine, right, DLC is not, because then you get scenarios like BF4 where EA tries to squeeze as much money out of you as possible just for a few new maps and weapons. That's not a significant enough change to get me to spend more money.

I don't actually think this will be a thing. And I know I won't pay for any mods.

The majority of mods wouldn't be paid for, heck there may be _no_ mods up for payment.

But y'know, why not have the opportunity?

Expansions are DLC, DLC just means downloadable content. Personally to me 5 dollars or so is perfectly fine for a map pack and stuff. I guess I just don't understand why you'd get actually mad at them for being sold, I understand why you might not want to buy them though.

Sounds like you believe in the concept of DLC(DLC is kinda like mini Expansions after all) but don't approve of the Execution of DLC due to several poor/malicious/unjust DLC.

Or rather, you don't trust Developers/Publishers to do it correctly which is truth enough in my books.

Mike

if the BF4 DLC were $5, it'd be no problem - it's $15 for each one unless you buy premium, which is $50 for all of them + a few extra perks. Additionally, DLC can be an expansion, expansions can be DLC, but expansions are not always DLC, DLC means the content is downloadable. Many expansions also have a bit more than a few maps or weapons, some, like brood war, heart of the swarm, forged alliance, and call of duty: united offensive - just to name a few that I own - offer something entirely new. In the case of brood war and heart of the swarm, tweaked multiplayer and a new campaign. In the case of forged alliance and call of duty: united offensive, radically improved gameplay. I also really like the concept of the standalone expansion, like FA, because FA practically made the original supreme commander obsolete, there's no reason to play it over FA. It means that I didn't have to buy the original supcom with forged alliance.

If I'm not mistaken, then you would have to own both originally. If you didn't, then you were only able to play the Seraphim faction in multiplayer.

well, I said I didn't *have* to buy them both originally, but I did anyways, the gold edition was on sale

Spoiler

seraphim is the best anyways :^)

I think most modders do this for fun and won't make paid mods anyway. You won't get rich from it anyhow.
I don't mind donations in fact if you use hotbuild2 and you would want to donate I'll put that money directly back in PA community as tournament prize money. I also think an official modmarket shouldn't be high up Uber's priority list. PAMM works very good, so I rather have them work on other things.

I just think it's really crazy how favoritism for ideas deteriorate over time.

back durring the livestreams + alpha + pre alpha everybody was ALLLLL OVER the mod market.

now everyone's disgusted by it.

maybe all the extra modders left and now you're just left with the most masochistic

the mod market already exists, it's called PAMM, the only thing missing is paid-for mods and if the creators of PAMM would like to set that system up, that's fine.

@jables @sorian @bgolus @mkrater

please we need an official answer on this people need to know if they are wasting their time by holding out on mods that they are keeping for an eventual mod market or not.

Not having an answer is potentially hurting the mod scene.