Paid For Mods

What's with the paid for mods? Its one thing putting a donation button for a coffee, but seriously making people pay for a mod. This community has gone so long without it and recently its becoming a new trend. I get it you worked hard to create something, I respect that but with the amount of leaking that's going on not just in beam but many other modidng communities your project is bound to be leaked sooner or later. All in all I think charging people for your mods is a scummy thing to do. RANT OVER

 

I get why people disagree with paid mods but honestly with the amount of harassment modders get over free mods you might as well make them paid. Also considering you sometimes spend months making a mod, and that money doesn't grow on trees, it's a pretty easy choice for modders that make decent stuff.

Selling your work is not scummy, a mod is technically a product after all. If a baker can sell his bread, why can't a modder sell his mods? After all, we spend hours making this stuff.

Feel free to disagree with me.

 

It's not scummy at all, Would you steal a McDonalds meal off the counter because it costed money?

 

Paid mods are completely fine, I only see an issue with them if it's the average meshslap with 0 effort put in and people trying to sell it for quick cash, and half the time that model isn't even theirs.

Scratch made mods, such as the Picnic, are worth being paid, because of the time and effort put into it. It's a shame paid mods are looked down upon because of the awful side of the community who sells those awful meshslaps.

In conclusion though, I have nothing against paid mods, and if they're actually well made, I see no issue in it.

 

I have never paid a mod, but I have nothing against who makes paid mods, as long as they're good quality material (such as the Picnic).

 

Paid mods are great if what you're paying for is of good quality, but Beam seems like an odd place to do it in my opinion as the act of "leaking a mod" is simply copying a zip file and reuploading it which is guaranteed to happen. If I were a mod creator, I'd be annoyed trying to stay on top of all the leaks. But at the end of the day a lot of people are still going to pay for your work and you'll make what is essentially donation money that can fund the hours you put into your next mod, project or whatever it might be.

Overall, I'm not really sure what I think of paid mods yet, and I think that's a sensible stance we should all adopt. We've been shown it can work (despite backlash) with the Picnic and maybe future mods (Such as the Civetta Mondello, or whatever it was called) will strengthen that view. On the contrary it may become a polluted scene, full of bad quality mods that people want money for that should probably be free.

 

On one hand, the market could regulate itself. Personally I wasn't interested in mesh slaps when they were free, so I'm certainly not interested in them now when they cost money. Of course it's hard to determine the mod quality before buying if the seller does a bad job of presenting it. Many screenshots of different parts of the car, jbeam, videos of driving, crashing etc should be a guiding principle when you decide on whether a mod is worth buying.

Of course if paid mods ever became supported on the repository, there could be some better quality control. But that's probably not gonna happen.

 

It's literally just people asking for a few dollars for high quality mods, either you understand that or you are that type or according to your logic you are an anarchist lol

Look, in a supermarket you also have to pay for things, same thing here. The mods are usually very high quality, so why not asking for a few dollars if they are worth it?

 

I haven't exactly made a paid mod yet but I will support them all the way as long as they're good and don't use stolen assets.
I love that i'm helping out fellow modders and they don't even cost that much. I would even love it if they came onto the repo because there would be better quality control and more traffic.

 

*cough cough* Claria *cough cough*

But yeah, I agree since there would be no more illegally sold meshslaps anymore

 

Yeah thats what I meant by the 'exactly' since its just early access that's paid, it will be free when its done

 

Yes. If I'm hungry and don't have money I'm stealing food, might as well go to Mac Donalds, it will hurt them less than a smaller place

 

Agreed, I've also seen a few mods that are "paid while in development, free when developed" which I think is a good compromise because you can support the development, the community gets quality mods, and the creator probably avoids the "bad mod fix now " comments.

So far all the paid ones I've seen were quality mods, but eventually someone will try making them for a quick buck and I don't want to buy a mod to find out it's poor quality or was abandoned after an update broke it.

 

This method is good yea. Those who don't wanna buy it can wait out the release date. And in the end you don't end up in a situation where the mod is aging behind a paywall while leaks are roaming around on third party sites. But whichever method suits the creator.

 

I support paid mods, not paid Russian shitty meshslaps

 

I respect and understand those who believe their work deserves compensation, but honestly I respect those who release their work for free a lot more.

 

People who say 'I only support some paid mods' do not understand the premise of unleased libertarian consumerism, if it can be sold for money it will be sold for more and more until people stop buying it, what was 3 dollars today will be 4 come tomorrow. Many modders will use it simply as a way to balance out effort put into it, many more will use it as a exploit for money generated from slapping meshes onto premade vehicle jbeams with questionable quality. You can't do much to be 'for' or 'against' paid mods besides either buying it or not, cause once it is out of the cage it is the free market and the free market could care less about what it considers a product of quality or a fair price, it cares about consumerism and if you think that countless meshslaps selling for close to $10 a piece are stupid and obvious scams then tell me why there are more and more each day getting pumped out? It would not be done if it didn't work.

You can be 'pro compensation' for modders but that is VERY different from being 'pro paid mods', compensation is a mod user giving what they feel is appropriate compensation for the time and effort placed into a mod, often set by the consumer themself and not the modder, as a token of gratitude, like you might give a tip to your server. Supporting paid mods is supporting EERY paid mod's right to exist, from mods you deem worthy of being paid to a meshslap 25 dollar shitsack lambo sold on a russian website, being pro paid mods is supporting the consumerist belief that anyone is entitled to get any compensation they feel like for their product, for better or for worse.

If you can look at a paid mod and say 'that is not right' then you do not support paid mods, you support appropriate compensation for modders, and uronically you support it at a rate you choose and not them, if you buy a 3 dollar mod and not a 8 dollar mod, you have displayed the principles of consumer driven compensation, and are helping to establish limits for what paid mods can and cannot sell for. Mods in games like Flight Simulator sell for hundreds because this type of restraint is not displayed by the consumers, likewise with the shitty paid meshslaps selling for upwards of half of the games value, as many consumers have little restraint when it comes to getting a vehicle they idolize in game, even if it is lower quality than desired.

At the end of the day, you don't have to agree with me and say that rampant consumerism has no place whatsoever in this community, you can still support the premise of paid mods and that is perfectly acceptable, but if you can think of examples of some paid mods that are unjust, ripoffs, and quick buck scams, you need to understand its not just a bad person that makes these scams happen, but a system we are building right now that makes it fully possible and socially acceptable to demand whatever they feel as just compensation for their work. So if you can stand with it till the end, then you can say you support paid mods, until then, stick with saying you support Appropriate Compensation, because you support mod creators, not a libertarian consumerist system rapidly growing here in the community.

 

Good points. What I can't wrap my head around is why people would buy and there for raise the value of crappy mesh slap mods. They have always had the lowest reputation anyway, so they should also have the lowest value. But as you say, they seem to come out so I guess they sell.. Let's not forget that selling ripped models is illegal, so these people run the risk of getting into trouble.

What everyone who is against paid mods should have done was to not flood the Picnic thread with complains / demonizing Lucas for a hand crafted mod. It led to this whole thing being way more polarized than it had to be. Everyone could have been united against crappy scam mods from the start, and it would have been more controlled, maybe.

Also my opinion. Don't have to agree with me.

 

Fair point, however those meshslaps are marketed towards kids and new buyers who have little to no comprehension of how the game mechanics work, and simply see it and think 'wow that seems nice' and buy it with no pretext on whether or not that is a fair price for in game vehicles. Its like marketing cheap toys to kids for way more than they are worth (another unethical yet totally normal side product of unrestricted libertarian consumerism), most toys have gotten worse in quality, while maintaining prices or even raising costs. For example, there was a number of studies and articles done on children's bikes sold by Walmart, and how they where designed to be ridden for on average 40 hours before breaking or falling apart, and yet the cost of these bikes began rising during the pandemic as demand for bikes increased, which led to bikes being pumped out faster with lower quality to meet demand, resulting in worse bikes being sold for more.

The same applies here, there is and continues to be a large demand for real supercar/sportscar/hypercar mods in BeamNG, and while the quality of these mods are often pathetic, they are continually pumped out to meet this demand. When the paid mods became popular, many of these mods where made paid mods and advertised to customers in the manner of 'well if it is free then it must be lower quality, why else would they just give them out for nothing?'. This leads to a market for false quality mods that still persists, and is the leading reason why I personally do not support paid mods being advertised here.

As for the demonization of LBE for paid mods, that is entirely unjust, while I do not condone many of the things that happened with the picnic, I have even less respect for people who would harass someone over .zip file, and absolutely zero respect for anyone who would escalate the situation into something they feel is worthy of death threats.

This is sadly another factor of consumerism that is a negative payout of paid mods on the server. With a consumerist aspect, people will demand vehicle quality even higher than that of developer vehicles (doing the math and dividing the total cost you paid for the game by the number of cars in game you can get roughly $1 CAD per vehicle in BeamNG, if my memory serves me right with there being approximately 28 vehicles in game as of writing. This would mean any vehicle sold for more than $1 CAD would be expected to have quality rivaling and exceeding any developer vehicle. When payments become involved, the consumer then feels entitled to this quality product, and is more justified than someone downloading a free mod to nitpick and complain about certain mod features. Once again, many people will take this too far, but it is generally amplified by a "I paid $xx I deserve a product worth $xx" which would only feed any ill will the consumer feels.

I am not entirely against paid mods, modders have every right to ask for compensation, yet bringing those paid mods here is where I drop all my support.