Military history, video games and miniature wargaming.
RPGs, single player FPS, RTS and 4X, grog games.
Passionate about complaining about Warhammer.
Catholic, socialist, and an LGBT+ ally.
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They're fucking mods. WARNING: INCOMING ANGRY CHOST (yes that's also a Reboot reference.)
Games and DLCs made with profit incentive in mind often fucking suck
Modders spend years making mods for shits, giggles, their own desires, and probably internet points. The most probable reason why they take so long is that they have to go to work to stay alive.
Modding, just like any other artistic endeavor, would benefit immensely from people not being forced to work.
Plus, even if a modder wanted to get paid, there are plenty of sites for tip jars, and places like gumroad and booth for files. No need to just force Bethesda in the middle there.
Yeah, there's nothin' wrong (outside of Capitalism At Large) with wanting to get paid for your work, and there's plenty of places to do it.
But I'm very nebulous about paywalling mods, because A: someone can just remake it and release it for free in a lot of cases, in a very legally dubious situation to begin with, and, just as important, B: fracturing a community with paywalls is a great way to harm and maybe even kill that community.
That's why I went further than simply poopooing the idea of Bethesda being solely at fault for trying to get their extra bullshit cut, and looked more toward cautioning against the potentially disastrous act of paywalling parts of something that are built on a community sharing their work; not just in making the mods themselves, but the road up to, including, and after that show the act of creating mods is rarely, if ever, lone individuals - in learning about the thing, sourcing bugs and reproducing errors, collaborating to create new and improved external tools for everyone to then build upon, and so on and so forth, the magic of modding communities.
It smacks me as quite unfair if some are getting paid and others aren't, or can't easily because of the nature of the thing they're making (OpenMW being a great example of one of the best projects to ever come out of a modding community, and one of the least likely to be legally profitable), and that's probably because modding is such a community effort and environment that bringing payment and profit into it can be enough to kill it.
If you're doing, y'know, commission work, or other paid work involving mods - great! I just hope it involves setup that doesn't involve paywalling the work, because, especially in the modding community, it... Never works.
Yes. Yes. My exact point in less than a whole paragraph. Yes.
If people could just work on what they wanted and release it for others to enjoy, without the pressure of needing to do any other major energy-draining thing to "earn" a paycheck, modding would still exist. It'd probably be even more widespread. So would games, and game dev. Probably far healthier, too, albiet slower.
However, that's not reality, and maybe won't be in our lifetime (though I'm holding onto hope). Reality bears the weight of Late Stage Capitalism right now, and people need the bread held at arm's length by the Wealthy. Until we finally get sick of it and put down the ploughshares in favour of guillotines, we live in a reality where survival means work, for most.
Are there FAR more important things to get angry about? Yes. Am I angry about them? Yes. Constructively? Yes, where possible. That's why I don't rant about them here all that often - I have other outlets. But this? The ability to modify a thing to fit my personal tastes and desires, to the consequence and harm of no one? Even if that thing is just a video game? That's still important.
The only constructive thing that I CAN do about it, however, is blast my opinion online about it and hope to add to the chorus of voices that drown out the whales and the uncaring Wealthy, to make the Vox more powerful than the Divitiae, and cling to what few humanities that remain unpillaged.
