Paid For Mods

I dont support paid mods at all, most gaming communities make mods because they love the game and want to see their favorite cars/trucks/etc in the game, MODDING IS A HOBBY, NOT A PROFIT DRIVEN BUSINESS
Especially in beamng drive where you pay 10 euros for a car mod for a game that costs less than 10 dollars, and lets be honest you can only remember 1 or 2 sellers that actually make a good job, most paid mods are just meshlaps with a stolen or imported model from other games, they are putting minimal effort and you all keep buying them.
I have created mods for both OMSI 2 and GTA SA, none of them with profit in mind, only because i wanted some specific thing in the game and there was no one making it.
Until the paid modding stops or actually starts trying to sell quality products with support for next game versions i will keep supporting people to leak then!

 

am I correct in interpreting what you're saying as "i'm happy to leak LucasBE's mods because a bunch of other people also sell grifty meshslaps?"
because "the modders" as a whole are never going to all make quality products, some shitty people are in it just to bodge a meshslap together, hype it up to a bunch of naïve 12 year olds, then take the money and run off, they're never going to change, and if you hold the whole community to account because of their actions, you're not helping at all.
that being said, if your only intention is to leak mods that themselves already use stolen meshes, etc. I'd say you've got some justification.

 

I am really starting to get really tired of this community. Move on already, jeez.

 

This community has the most mixed opinion on mods that cost money tbh.

 

Are you surprised? There are people playing this game on 12-year-old laptops getting 15FPS at 800x600. They either don't have the money to spend on mods/extra content, or they're too young to sign up to the places that sell them... probably both. Either way, they're probably not paying for the game either, so I throw their opinions in my mental trashbin.

 

you know almost every hobby has a price right? be glad that the majority of beamng mods are free, and stop being so selfish when a modder only has one or two paid mods out of the majority of their mods.

 

The bit I still don't get about the whole argument is that if you don't like paid mods....don't...pay..for...them.

You don't need all the mods. Just use the ones that are free. There are loads. Just see the paid ones as the same thing as another game you want but would have to pay for. If you want it enough and have the money, pay for it. If you don't, then don't.

 

no way this thread is still going

 

Any of the modders who thinks the work they've done is worth the amount they want to charge is delusional, you can grab full sized DLC's for released games for less. Look at Skyrim modding (Legacy of the dragonborn in particular) and then come back to me saying how your sedan with 8-12 configs and less parts than a stock beam car is worth the whatever you're wanting to charge for it .

Then you have the ownership issues when the paid mod becomes outdated and the author hasn't updated it, the loss of quality when its just done for a paycheck vs vs passion project...the list goes on.

If mods had been pay to play from the start, like waaaaaay back in the 90's/early 2000's (gta1, 2 & 3 era) then it'd never be as big as it is now.

I get it - times are tough and people want to make bank, but modding was always and will always be free. Paid mods will slow down progress, prevent tons of people from getting involved in the game/community and shift them to something else instead.

Its gonna happen regardless and it'll fizzle out in a year or two, lets just hope it doesn't disuade too many people from getting involved until that happens haha.

Modland/World of Mods is going to be getting a massive boost in users haha

Ranty McRantRant over haha

 

Ah yes, "people who disagree with me are stupid children with low end hardware, thus their opinions are invalid"

 

in an impossible turn, it is.
It's surprising how we're still stuck on this.
It's also quite funny how the most logical sounding arguments are made for paid mods and the less logical are made against them. At least, that's what I've seen.

 

I never said stupid, I think you just saw what you wanted to there.
--- Post updated ---

The argument is stupid. At the end of the day, people will create content for us to enjoy, some of it free of charge and some of it paid, and we'll just get on with it. Those who won't pay for it won't and those who can, will.

 

No, I saw that you invalidated other opinions based entirely on assumptions

 

no need to be aggressive and dismissive about it, it's quite a good observation.
One would expect games like AC and flight sim to be played by more mature people with money to spend on sim gear, but games like GTA5 also have quite a few paid mods, but there seems to be very little argument over the justification of their existence.

It's possible that as some have eluded to, a lot of BeamNG players have the impulse to download every single mod they see, some people even going as far as to download meshslaps of real cars that are very similar to vanilla ones.
thus when there's something an (especially younger) player can't have, *neuron is activated*, and thus they make a whiny forum post about it.
But in the GTA community, there are way more people making content, by virtue of it being easier to do and the game being more mainstream, which also means multiple people will often mod the same thing in, so even impulsive people can't get every single mod, and thus don't bother with the paid ones.

anyone else have other thoughts?

 

Figured I should throw my own two cents in, since this seems like quite the controversial topic. Fortunately others said what I wanted to say mostly so this will be easy by now.

Pretty much everything here is all that needs to be said, to be honest.

I will just add a few of my own somewhat brief points:

1. Just about every platform, software, etc, which allows third party mods (aka plugins), has audiences for both free and paid content. It is a very normal thing and no one should be surprised at all by creators and third party developers desiring to sell their work.
   
   
   
2. Creators selling work should be sure content rights are appropriate. If they use others' work in their own for-profit mods, that mod should not be sold unless they secure appropriate authorization, such as mandated credits or royalties. I agree with others in absolutely frowning upon people who sell work they did not create. Platforms that allow sales of third party mods need to spend a lot of time enforcing this. The big problem is most of the time they do not, and it leads to the mess that certain mod sites have turned in to.
   
   
   
3. A thriving community of free mods is always important. Creators who sell their work should make an effort to create some free content, even if it is limited or restricted in some way. It shows they care about giving back to the community, and it also serves as self-advertisement for people to sample their work without paying and to attract potential customers. It is a win-win for everyone. Without the community, they wouldn't have a potential customer base. Its only fair to support the community which made it possible for them to sell their work in the first place.
   
   
   
4. Lastly, it is very difficult to attract quality content creators who will sink hours into creating great content without a way to protect their work. Reasoning is obvious... Sink 200 hours into a project just for people to copy/paste directly into their own projects with no restrictions? That flaw limits the amount of time people will spend unless they are okay with that content being free or eventually leaking. People who will sink hundreds or thousands of hours into a free project with zero monetization purely for reputation gain are few and far between. This is why open source software has various licenses... it doesn't stop it, but it helps from a legal perspective. But lets be real; you have little to no legal protection creating third party mods for a video game. Anyway, I digress.
   
   200 hours may sound like a lot, but in reality its not. 200 hours is just over a month of full time work. There are many mods out there for various games where people have sunk way more time than that. It takes time to build & QA. Without a way to protect work, the vast majority of mods are going to be rushed or recycled efforts. Technicalities of providing that protection is a topic that is too in-depth to discuss in this thread. I guess the main point I wanted to express is low quality and/or recycled paid mods is going to be a consistent problem because there is no protection, and solving that problem isn't anywhere on BeamNG's radar for a game that is still in alpha with a seemingly long road ahead to make it to a release version. At least it shouldn't be.
   
   
   
5. Regarding BeamNG players specifically for whatever reason not liking paid mods... I would personally attribute this to BeamNG still being an alpha game. Although it is "for sale", it is still technically early access and has various bugs, performance optimization issues, etc. I can understand why some people may think selling mods for an "early access" game is a bit weird or abnormal. I feel if the game was "released" this would not be such a controversial discussion.

 

People deserve compensation for their time spent on mods

 

I agree that paid mods should exist, some of the mods these people are creating are really near dev quality (even though one or other is a meshlap).

What I don't agree is the form that it is priced, I said something about it in another Thread that got to this same issue, mod creators should be compensated, but the finances should be something more like Steam does, that is, being country dependent, in some places of the World the whole game costs 1USD, and there are mods that are being sold for 5USD, for people that paid 25USD for the whole game, 5 USD doesn't look like much, but for the people that paid 1USD, is the mod worth more than 5 times the whole game?

I Know some people will say something in the lines of: "well, then just don't buy the mod", but if paid mods catches on, people will do less and less free mods and make the whole community inaccessible

 

in order for me to buy one it would need to be supported for a long time because once you charge for it it is no longer just a hobby it is a product and you cannot just stop supporting it because you lose interest

 

I played it on a dual core pentium at 640x480 at 30 fps on grid small pure. BeamNG has some of the most hardcore low end gamers