Modding raises questions about the nature of game development
Modding, gaming language for modifying, has become a popular element in gaming in the past years. For some games it is not only accepted, but encouraged. With increasing computer literacy and the ease of which modding has been made, it is an essential part of gaming. But with the complexity and effort in some mods amounting to a full game, the idea modding as a way to make money raises several quandaries about the nature of the gaming industry.
Private donations are one way modders earn caps
There are numerous ways to earn money through videogames outside of being an official developer, and modding has increasingly been considered as one of these forms. A simple way is direct donations or through sites such as Patreon. And this seems to be one of the more direct methods, a simple transaction of people supporting a creator and numerous modding communities exist. For Fallout 4 and the Fallout series as a whole, mods for Fallout and other Bethesda titles are found almost exclusively at Nexus Mods.
Paid mods, a deal with the devil, or a lucrative opportunity?
Will paid mods help provide high quality mods or will it simply lock out gamers with a pay wall?
Outside of donations to a modder, there is the controversial route of paid mods, where in mods work like DLC, not needed (hopefully) to play and enjoy the base game, but act as fun additions to the experience. Of course gamers are not likely to be happy with having to pay for something they previously got for free, and this may not be an option seeing as how Steam’s experiment with paid mods went. However I believe that if all parties involved can work together, this could be a new age of gaming where games extend far beyond the confines of their developers.
If I were to lay out how paid mods should work, it would have to be based on the agreement that the base game will still be playable and enjoyable without mods (and dlc). The important thing for me, as well as gamers would be that a paid mod is entirely optional. Of course I think that asking to pay for a reskin or a minor tweak to gameplay is unacceptable, but when you begin making massive changes to the experience, or adding games within the game, I can see how compensating the modder for their work would be sensible, perhaps the developer could pay them instead in exchange for both advertising the game for them and acting as outsourced patchers. Whatever the case, paid mods are a tightrope needed to be tread very carefully indeed.
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