Recent Events Discussion (RED) Thread

[Celestialphoenix]

With the humble bundle type thing, I think it would be cool charging for certain modpacks, and giving half of the profits to the individual modders and half to a charity. That sounds really neat. Especially if it was just like $5 or something like that.

100% for charity; otherwise you'll get one hell of a shitstorm regarding who gets what as it rolls back around into mod monetisation rather than pure charity.

Its not a simple split as mods have/had different numbers of devs/teams, as well as their own addons, api/coremods/componentised modules. Also -without a doubt- many devs and community members will be left feeling sour as their work/favourite wasn't included.​

That aside- modpacks aimed at raising money for charity would be a brilliant thing to pursue. [given the scale of the modding community it'll raise a fair bit of dough for a good cause].

Even if we're assuming that some future version of the Mojang EULA would allow monetization, any mod that tried it would be in Pirate Bay faster than you could say.

Piracy itself is not a reason to reject this concept; if it were then musicians/directors/authors or any other digital artist might as well not charge for their work.

 

[1SDAN]

It's like I challenged people on Twitter. If you think paid mods is a good thing, then come up with a price for your favorite mods and go donate that to them today. If you're not willing to donate now then you're not willing to buy it later.

Words to live by... That and P.O.O.P.

 

[SpitefulFox]

Any explicit monetization of MC Mods is a drama shitstorm waiting to explode. Sad but true

Have you seen this community? A modder takes a sip of water and it's a drama shitstorm.

 

[the_j485]

Have you seen this community? A modder takes a sip of water and it's a drama shitstorm.

OH, NO IT ISN'T!

 

[Bagman817]

Piracy itself is not a reason to reject this concept; if it were then musicians/directors/authors or any other digital artist might as well not charge for their work.

While you make a good point, there are several reasons to believe that piracy would a much more significant issue in this specific instance. First, the audience for mainstream media is, well, everyone. With an audience so large, piracy can have fairly high absolute numbers, and still leave enough paying customers to support the product. Second, consumers of MC mods are at least somewhat "tech literate" if you will. Believe it or not, the larger portion of the population may be aware of piracy as a concept, but have no knowledge of/interest in the details of actually getting it done. I submit that a large percentage of players of modded MC have that knowledge. Third, and (IMO) most importantly, in contrast to traditional media, the modded MC community expects the product to be free, and as such would likely be highly motivated to maintain the status quo.

For the record, I've seen nothing that would suggest that Mojang (even under Microsoft) would consider changing their EULA regarding mods, so while what's happening on Steam is interesting, I doubt it's going to end up being relevant to our community.

 

[Bagman817]

Have you seen this community? A modder takes a sip of water and it's a drama shitstorm.

While I agree with the sentiment of the post you quoted, that was @TomeWyrm that said it, not me

 

[SpitefulFox]

While I agree with the sentiment of the post you quoted, that was @TomeWyrm that said it, not me

That's really weird. I clicked quote on TomeWyrm's post, but it's pointing at you? Must be a forum software glitch.

 

[TomeWyrm]

Huh, it pinged me for the quote and points to me on my end.

There's a difference between drama, and drama shitstorm. Explicit Monetization would make Tekkit/Forestry, FlowerChild/BetterThanWolves, and Greg/mDiyo look like butterfly farts. Call it entitlement, call it tradition, call it expectation, call it a unicorn if you want. Mods for MC are free to use, have been free to use, and if they don't remain free to use it's not going to end well.

Which does NOT mean you can't make money for your work in any way, shape ,or form; it just means you can't require us to pay to gain access. Even if the EULA changes, that's been established as rather core to the community at this point, and I can't see that changing.

 

[Arkandos]

If I ever were to pay for a Skyrim mod, why would I ever do it on the steamworkshop?

It's one of the worst content deliverysystems.

 

[immibis]

Huh, it pinged me for the quote and points to me on my end.

There's a difference between drama, and drama shitstorm. Explicit Monetization would make Tekkit/Forestry, FlowerChild/BetterThanWolves, and Greg/mDiyo look like butterfly farts. Call it entitlement, call it tradition, call it expectation, call it a unicorn if you want. Mods for MC are free to use, have been free to use, and if they don't remain free to use it's not going to end well.

Which does NOT mean you can't make money for your work in any way, shape ,or form; it just means you can't require us to pay to gain access. Even if the EULA changes, that's been established as rather core to the community at this point, and I can't see that changing.

In other words, "It's always been this way, therefore it shouldn't change"?

 

[1SDAN]

In other words, "It's always been this way, therefore it shouldn't change"?

According to the average Minecrafter, that's a very solid reason

...I hate overpopulation

 

[XolovA]

In other words, "It's always been this way, therefore it shouldn't change"?

That rule does have to apply in some circumstances. When there is a risk of a community collapse if you do it, it'd be a very unwise move to do it. Put it this way: Their current system works - it may not be 100% ideal but it works. If they make a drastic change and it doesn't work, well.. goodbye many many players aka customers. I don't think you need to be that well versed to have seen how many games have 'fallen from grace' from the top of the charts from making unwise decisions that vastly change the in-place systems.

In Mojang's opinion, why fix what isn't broken? It's not the perfect ideal, but it certainly is not broken.


**A little note**
In the case you think I'm a biased community member, I'm certainly not. If I was able to make even a little off the downloads I got that would have been amazing. However, I'm not willing to risk losing a large portion of my playerbase over personal greed. I'm not in this for the money, if a modder is: They are in it for the wrong reasons. This should be done as a passion and because they want to share their work with others.


A quick little story as for a deeper view (for those who care- if you don't, go eat an apple, I heard they're healthy):
A while back I was contacted by one of my download website contacts who was rolling out a new style of test-site. I was contacted because he wanted me to now host my downloads there. I've known from past experience he paid 2-2.5X as much as anything like ad.fly or linkbux. This one would be paying 6x as much. The catch was it makes so much money because the page is an ad-collage, totally covered. He warned me I'd actually have about 20-30% less downloads (because users would not be able to navigate the mess [and regional restrictions]) but still get paid more due to the sheer number of ads. He couldn't understand for his life why I turned down that deal- Making nearly quadruple what I currently take in?

My point there is that he among many others thought modders will do anything to make a quick buck. Those who do, you're being an utter disgrace to the work. Don't be a sellout. I'd much rather have more people playing my content than ever making a dime. What I do is about sharing my creations, not pissing off 30% of my potential customers so I can get some fancy sunglasses.

 

[1SDAN]

That rule does have to apply in some circumstances. When there is a risk of a community collapse if you do it, it'd be a very unwise move to do it. Put it this way: Their current system works - it may not be 100% ideal but it works. If they make a drastic change and it doesn't work, well.. goodbye many many players aka customers. I don't think you need to be that well versed to have seen how many games have 'fallen from grace' from the top of the charts from making unwise decisions that vastly change the in-place systems.

And THERE'S the reasoning I was thinking but too lazy to point out. Thank you for saving me a lot of time and effort.

Also, I see modding as less of a way to make money and more of a way to build a resume and fanbase. That way when you come out with "Minecraft Simulator HD 1080x No Blocks Bloom Lighting Zombie Mayhem Car Jack Weeaboo Supah Party", you'll have a fanbase who won't think you're just another Minecraft imitator trying to support the Wii U.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

To rebut the idea of paid-for mods ala Steam, I have a more coherant reason than 'because it has always been free'. Simple economics: there's no money in it.

How many of you would be willing to purchase, say, Buildcraft for $2? Okay, now how many of you would be willing to pay $2 for every other mod in the pack that you play? Great. Now how many of you would be willing to shell out another $2 every time the mod iterated to a new version (i.e. Thaumcraft 3 was $2, then Thaumcraft 4 was another $2).

Most packs on the FTB Server? If you were doing that, you'd have to pay over $100, and that's being EXCEEDINGLY generous, just to play the pack. That's five TIMES what I paid for the game.

Then let's get into the logistics. How can you tell if someone has properly paid or not paid for a particular mod? Well, obviously, you'd have to build the infrastructure, find some way to flag accounts, and have a TON of administrative hassles on the Mojang end, since they are the only ones who can interface with accounts directly,

Now let's talk about the changes that would have to occur to mod packs. It would be flat impossible to run mod packs as they currently do because you'd be distributing paid-for content, which is Piracy by anyone's standards. So instead of distributing mod packs, you'd have to have a centralized mod database/market, and you'd have to have someone (most likely Mojang) run said database/market, then instead of actually distributing packs, they'd be distributing a code that tells your launcher which mods are used, which would then probably have to check with the market to make sure you have purchased them, before it would load. If there's any mods you haven't purchased yet, it would probably prompt you to buy them or give you some kind of message telling you that until you buy this mod you can't play on this pack.

Which also means a change in how launchers are done from the ground up.

In other words... I could see Microsoft buying Curse and setting Curse up as the market with built-in launcher, but unless that happens, don't plan on seeing paid-for mods any time soon. From an economical and logistical point of view, it is simply not feasible.

 

[FyberOptic]

Microsoft Flight Simulator doesn't come with the best of planes, so the community makes up for that with quite a number of replicas. There's free content, but many of the good ones come with a price tag. Since the average Flight Simulator player is typically an older individual, who quite possibly is also a pilot, they count on them having plenty of money to spend. So some of these planes are really freaking expensive. We're talking upwards to a hundred bucks. That's not counting all the other stuff people like to add, like better weather, ATC, scenery, airports, flight planners, etc. Hardcore Flight Sim fans can easily spend a grand on the software and hardware to play it.

So I'm not really even sure what kind of price tag anyone could reasonably expect to put on a Minecraft mod when you consider that the overall average age is still mostly young people who don't even have money. And more importantly, you can count on playing Flight Simulator for years and for the add-ons to likely still work just fine regardless of any game patches. If you factor in the unpredictability of Minecraft modding, the value of a mod (at least in regards to a price tag) drops even lower.

I think some of the community is blinded by the older portion who has the means to donate and forgets that they don't make up the large majority of those actually playing their mods. The moment you put a price tag on something the number of users drops significantly. When your user base is gone, the chance of you getting new fans who actually have money drops as well. I honestly think that the people making the top mods probably make more in the environment we're in now than they ever would in one where they could sell them.

Mods are still valuable. There's just a difference between their inherent value and priceable value.

 

[Arkandos]

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/cqoldb5

 

[Reika]

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/cqoldb5

This is very true, but nonetheless there are developers now that treat everything as a trade secret and every mod as a competitor....

 

[XolovA]

This is very true, but nonetheless there are developers now that treat everything as a trade secret and every mod as a competitor....

Well, you have to keep some things quiet to a point. Something like how to do an animation should be public, because it's widely used and has infinite possibilities. However, if I were to release exactly how I made each of my dimensions, I give it a week until ripoffs spring up everywhere.

With a payment system, most modders will be stuck in the stone-age creating obsidian tools.

 

[Strikingwolf]

Well, you have to keep some things quiet to a point. Something like how to do an animation should be public, because it's widely used and has infinite possibilities. However, if I were to release exactly how I made each of my dimensions, I give it a week until ripoffs spring up everywhere.

With a payment system, most modders will be stuck in the stone-age creating obsidian tools.

That isn't really the case, it doesn't happen with most open-source mods

 

[VapourDrive]

Just to remind people: there aren't that many names or recommendations on here considering how truly big these forums are, if the moderators mean something to you, you have a chance to have a say on who the task goes to