giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social


balketh
@balketh

They're fucking mods. WARNING: INCOMING ANGRY CHOST (yes that's also a Reboot reference.)


Mods are not your shitty fucking paid walled garden, which is entirely pirateable without even making an effort. And often, not all that worth fucking pirating, since free community mods are often leagues better.

If you want a cut of the free community effort to make your fucking games better for you, shut your fucking mouths and wait, since you're not willing to address any of the twenty-five years of design problems your games continue to have, when it's already your fucking jobs.

Oblivion and Skyrim are only big because you left modding capability in the game. Skyrim wouldn't be worth dogshit all if it didn't have mods. It would have been played and enjoyed and then forgotten, not rereleased a thousand times over. Same goes for Oblivion, and for Morrowind. Great games, but they wouldn't hold a fucking candle to their own glory without the ability to mod them, regardless of what console users think. It was PC modding that made Bethesda what it is today, and they've learned fucking nothing from it. Take a look at the top ten mods for all their previous games, and then Starfield, and you'll see exactly what I mean. Not a single lesson learned.

Stop trying to turn a community into a fucking workforce by waving the false fucking flag of 'bUt MoDdErS dEsErVe To GeT pAiD fOr ThEiR wOrK.'

In complete earnest? No, they don't. It's a hobby. It's not work. They are different things, and the disgusting hustle and grind culture of Late Stage Capitalism will ruin every last free creative effort humanity makes if we let it. If, as a Modder, you want to make it your job, then understand that if you try to paywall anything, someone else will do the work for free, out of spite. Free as in software beer. Not even real beer. That is not a sustainable marketplace. It never will be. And thus should not ever be somewhere targeted for life-sustaining employment. The only profit gainable out of these situations is via whales - which means it's just the fucking microtransaction plague under a new disguise. Especially since Bethesda wants their cut. Fucking sick to corpse-fucked death of it.

Modding, like modding anything in real life, has, and always will be, a hobby space first. Not a fucking job. Because anyone can do it, for (in this case) literally no up-front cost other than time - you don't even need to OWN the game to be able to make modifications for it, legally. It's about making improvements to the (often but not always) non-mission-critical thing you want to see improved, and if the rest of us are lucky, sharing those improvements with everyone so everyone has a better time. If that takes too much time out of your real life, too much stress, or cost, whether by dollar or opportunity, then stop. Don't make this hobby your fucking job, please.

It wouldn't be a fucking job for you if Bethesda released Good Modding Tools and stopped breaking the mod compatibility every time they released an update barely worthy of releasing. If their games were actually technically well-made. Starfield might be their LeAsT bUgGiEsT game ever, but that means nothing when it still has Bethesda-level bugs in it. When it still runs like dogshit. When the UI is still the worst UI they've ever done. Worse than Skyrim, for fuck's sake. It wouldn't ever be able to be a full-time life-supporting job if Bethesda, who their customers are already paying to do this, improved upon their craft in meaningful ways instead of expecting us to do it for them, for twenty five fucking years. But they don't.

Don't make that the community's problem by trying to force money into it. We all saw how that went with PureDark and DLSS3.

Someone else did it for free. That's not a sustainable market for any kind of job.


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in reply to @balketh's post:

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.

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