Monetizing mods

Dota 2.

Microtransactions present. ZERO impact on legitimate gameplay.

Do some research bmb before making such broad, sweeping statements. You're just showing yourself up.

I doubt that and since it's in closed beta you can't really use it as a good example.

Thanks, I won't really argue but from my own experience I have seen it. I modded for Brood War, WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2. The constant buzz surrounding the marketplace did untold damage to the StarCraft 2 custom community. People became far more hesitant to assist you and the community at large. Good luck asking someone to explain something unusual from your favorite map (even if they know). In previous Blizzard games it was typical to copy desired code/data and learn how it works on your own. This isn't possible in StarCraft 2 as there is a "content protection" system in place to prevent this. Even if a map is unlocked not trivial to find it on your computer or online. People are afraid to share their content or to pass it on for further development and asa result many map/mod communities have already died.

The entire iterative process that once drove the Blizzard custom community to develop games like Tower Defense and DOTA ceases to exist. I can point to many Brood War and WarCraft 3 user content resources that developed rapidly with the community - there are no equivalents for StarCraft 2. SC2Mapster is nothing like what Staredit.net was to Brood War or Hiveworkshop was to WarCraft 3.

Now I'm not going to say this is entirely the fault of the proposed marketplace. The initial failures of Battle.net 2.0, the unwieldiness of the editor, the lack of an open games list were likely factors. But you can't tell me the makers of SoTIS and StarCraft Universe and many others didn't explicitly give anticipation of the marketplace as their reason. And if you were involved in the StarCraft 2 custom community you are likely already aware of all of this.

garat you seem like a decent guy, but being a developer do you think you may be biased?

tl;dr premium content isn't just a neat way for guys to make money modding, it affects the general ethos of the mod community. it ruins the iterative process that drives user creation and creates barriers to cooperation.

Closed beta, hmm?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/570/

Anyone can play Dota 2. Either apply for a free Key, Ask a friend for a free Key (I have 15 copies that I can give away to anyone) or buy the game.

Dota 2 is not "closed"

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and that you "doubt that" is your problem. As I said before;
do your homework before posting such easily disprovable foolishness bmb.

I don't give a **** about dota anyway and I'm not going to buy a game just to show something obvious to you.

And goalposts are being moved again. Well done bmb... I boxed you into a corner of your own ignorance quicker than usual.

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Back on topic; veta, the idea of monetisation changing the prevailing mood of the modding community is something I've yet to see anyone in this thread post any hard proof of... there's been an article posted a little way up... but that's not scientific proof in any way, those were opinionated articles.

However I don't even think that it would stifle the iterative modding process even if it were proven. Money is an incetiviser. If someone thinks they're good enough to make a top-quality mod and think that they could make money doing so they're likely to view it as a possibility to actually WORK at it for a living, rather than dabbling here and there.

When you put more effort into something (due to a reward being present) you're more likely to get high quality work.

Again, Dota 2 has a thriving... absolutely THRIVING modding scene adding in cosmetics that the authors are payed for. There has been no dip in quality... in fact it could be very easily argued that the items created for that game have increased in quality... substantially I might add, over time.

the tf2 model of user generated dlc is not modding

You're right, my evidence is purely anecdotal. But I would be legitimately surprised if anyone who modded significantly for StarCraft II would disagree. The good news is things are getting better since I last checked.

That actually isn't true. People are more motivated by interest and passion.

Here's a good video on the subject if you have time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

As for education the best results aren't achieved with carrots. You get all the wrong people going into fields they don't care about and flunking because of the carrot.

Whereas schemes that require people to put in effort to get to the things they want to do generally gets the people who are determined to finish in.

Likewise monetization gets you the money grubbers and free legal gray areas gets you the people who are willing to sacrifice other parts of their lives to do this particular thing out of all the things they could be doing.

It's a noble goal to want to compensate people but you're doing them a bears favor.

In your opinion. Which is wrong.

Whine whine whine. Bmb you are a negative nancy.

Please, provide some concrete examples of mod marketplaces that support free and paid mods that have gone sour.

The majority of modders are still going to be releasing stuff for free. I don't think it's such a big deal really.

People talk about it ruining the spirit of cooperation, but I don't think that's the case. Pretty much a mod community mirrors the interactions we see in the Free and Open Source Software community, and plenty of FOSS has made the transition to having a paid version. Activecollab comes to mind as a prime example (and the paid version a couple years later is about 100x better than the free version was). Does that mean the FOSS community is ruined? It's looking stronger than ever to me.

Really what it comes down to is the licensing stuff. If I can release a mod with a "it's free and you can do whatever you want with it" license, then there's absolutely nothing to worry about. I know this hasn't seemed like an issue with mod communities before, but it's a shame really because it's a disservice to the modders to just assume everything is forkable. The FOSS community solved this problem ages ago with GPL and various types of some-rights-reserved licenses.

tldr: Modding is like FOSS, and there's nothing to worry about because the FOSS community has dealt with all these problems and is still stronger than ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-gener ... incentives

Edit: pertinent reads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
http://www.wisdump.com/web/the-overjust ... d-content/
The surprising truth about what motivates us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

It is well documented that giving rewards for an action makes people less likely to perform that action with no rewards, but this assumes every modder is getting monetary rewards. This is not the case. Only the top 5% (less?) will be getting monetary rewards, similar to how professional athletes get paid while the other 99.99% of athletes play sports only for fun and health benefits.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is different. Everyone gets (tiny) monetary rewards, making it a prime example for that Wikipedia article.

While I like the idea, it scares me. Actually, it really scares me, because it might as well be uncharted waters, and that means that there will be unexpected consequences with whatever happens. Murphy's law and all that. I'll post my concerns in numerical format:

1. Players unexperienced with the modding community and mods in general (which will be a lot, if you take the generalization that 1% of players go on the forum as relatively true) will see a payed modding market, and not be able to differentiate between the good paid mods, the bad paid mods, and the moneymaker paid mods. This has many ramifications. Mostly speculation of course, but then again, so are the positive benefits of such a system. My speculation is that players might be off-put enough by a bad mod that they paid for that they will lose credibility with Uber, which is something that I don't want to see. It also may simply discourage them from participating from the mod community itself, which doesn't happen as much if mods are simply free.

2. Another scenario is that enough people will make poor or simple mods to take advantage of the chance to make some off hand cash that these mods flood the community, making it that much harder to find good mods, leading to the scenario above, actually. This can be somewhat fixed with a rating system, though. Still, who's to know if anyone pays attention to the rating system if they are inexperienced.

3. People download free mods, take their code, and create another mod based on the free one, monetizing it. Players may take the monetized mod as the better one and buy it to support that person, when really it was the the person who developed the free mod that deserves the money and the credit. And it would be impossible to get that money to the person who created the free mod, unless you do something like sue the monetizer. It's far fetched, but certainly not impossible. It would also be alleviated by a rating system, but at the same time, if these mods are both created at about the same time, who's to say that the free version would get voted up more? This could be much more possible to happen as well if paid and free mods are divided into different categories, as players looking in the paid section wouldn't know to look for the free one.

This is all me speculating and coming up with things off the top of my head, but I see potential for abuse and turning away people from the modding community. I'm all for it happening, I simply fear the unkown and what it may bring. You can bet though that people will try to abuse the system and succeed.

Last thing I'll add: A lot of people keep calling it "rewards". I call it "getting paid to do what I love". I don't consider my salary a "reward". That is bizarre logic. But I have been lucky to work in a field I love for over 15 years and get paid to do it. But at no point has it demotivated me. My paycheck is a means to an end. Pay my bills and allow me to keep doing the stuff I love doing - making games. Allowing people to monetize their work is just giving them that same opportunity. Please, someone tell me what the fault with that is. And "I don't want to pay for mods" is a valid answer, but it contributes nothing to the conversation.

Encouraging content through financial gain and making money doing something you already do are entirely different. What I posted explicitly dealt with the former. Again, I can speak to my own experience in StarCraft II where only the possibility of explicit reward was introduced.

I see no reason not to support paypal donations. In fact, if somebody wants to sell their content outside the game let them. I actually love microtransactions (as long as they're ethical) but I loathe grind-for-perks like Team Fortress and Call of Duty.

The reality is Uber isn't the first developer to grapple with these issues and there is a lot of data on how supporting premium user content can negatively affect social and altruistic motivation. That may not be the case for PA. But I would encourage Uber to do their due diligence. Like I said, nothing should stop you from making money on mods if they're that good. It shouldn't be encouraged by Uber though.

Edit: phrasing

Your first 2 points make it seem as if there won't be any oversight to what makes it into the store, what if it was invite only or had a Greenlight-Lite before Content would be reviewed by Uber? Or that once a mod gets into the shop nothing else matters?

Frankly, it's very knee-jerk-y.

3rd Point is definitely something to consider, although not working with code I don't know much about that aspect, I do know that in terms of art assets to my understanding the artist holds on to his copyright(assuming the art isn't of something already copywritten) unless otherwise stated(potentially as part of the contract required to sell in the shop for example) so that might help in that regard.

Mods could even have an open/semi-open review, giving the community(thought primarily aimed at other modders) to double check for this kind of thing to stop it prior getting into the store.

Uber will have full control of the system, so it's not like it'll be run by the same people trying to exploit it as you seem to fear based on your first 2(and somewhat 3rd) points.

Also worth pointing out that this is not the same as being paid for content, modders aren't being funded to create content, there is no 'salary' or 'wage', fundamentally, what's being done is the modder is being rewarded for creating content that users like and want for a good value. If I get something into the store, I'm still only going to see some money if the content sells, and the hope is that that only happens if it's good content.

Mike

Indeed it was knee-jerky. Let's take a real-world example. What do you think would happen if some hospitals started paying for blood donations?

As I already said, it's possible this won't be a problem for PA. I would just encourage Uber to think about how this would be applied and the implications. If at the end of the day you want to encourage user-generated content then I would argue encouraging it through financial gain is a poor choice in the long term.

If you want to support existing content that is a different matter and that is what Steam Greenlight deals with. I feel this is the perspective many are coming from.

Look at other examples, the most prolific user content communities run almost exclusively on social motivation, some examples that come to mind are tumblr, flickr, minecraft, warcraft iii.