Yeah I completely agree with this If there are enough paid mods the “market” will sort its own fair prices out
I'm now waiting for the devs or anyone else with some actual game dev background to give us a brief roadmap for how that would work and, more importantly, what it would require on the company level. Theorizing about how to implement it in-game is one thing. Implementing what basically is an e-commerce store inside a video game is another. I have this feeling that managing payments inside BeamNG would be something time consuming (to say the least). Just make mods list supported game versions in meta. If your game version is different than what the mod supports, you can't buy it. This would require mod authors to update their mods with every major update. This may be a little bothersome, but at the same time evergreen mods wouldn't require much more than a reupload.
Perhaps in the future outdated mods could become open source once their creator has been inactive for a certain period of time (years), or authors could simply opt into having their mods become open source should they be broken after they've left the forums.
Good idea! And maybe a patreon/ko-fi like support for modders as well. Also I don't know but transfering money from beamng to modder might be a problem.
I believe we've had this happen with some free mods already, so all it would require is a clause in the agreement saying I agree to my mods becoming open source if not updated up to six months after the last major update.
I don't think it should work like this. Take the old Satsuma for example. Still works to my knowledge, despite not having been updated since 2018 and the creator not having been online since 2019. If that was paid people should still be able to buy it, just probably with a warning that it's at their own risk. Also maybe older mods that aren't supported anymore would become free to everyone?
That would have serious legal implications, sure the idea that anyone can fix it seems good, but anyone would be able to steal the assets from the mod too, and they would much rather steal them from a formerly paid mod than from a free one because paid = better quality
I believe that paid mods will be much more accessible and easier to find, however a side effect of this would be the underground mod pirating business only flourishing. I guess measures can be put in place to stop this, like password protection and individual copies.
I don't think that would be necessary. Modder's problem of low sales. And if someone buys it, it's their problem. Maybe there should be a "description template " that mod's description would have to fulfil.
While it is a great idea, and I have no problem with paying for mods (someone who is speaking from having multiple paid mods), I do think that if there is a paid repository it introduces a couple issues. One being that while seeming great, it would encourage more modders to go the direction of paid without even considering the wider general community for the mod. This is a pretty frustrating aspect as some modders who formerly only did free mods (that were fantastic), seemed to drift away from their other mods in a greater effort to monetize their effort and leave the wider community in the dark. The second being this, BeamNG was never, ever meant to be a paid-mod platform, and it was never meant to supply income to those whom used the platform. It was created off of the principles of Rigs of Rods, and game where you can just mess around and have fun, and create your own items to use in said game while you were bored or had free time. And for the devs to implement such a feature, would cause massive issues. I also think that overall drive to mod would decrease dramatically, as everyone would start to gravitate to the crazy high quality paid mods, rather than looking at the creators who help build this platform. Not to mention any way to test or verify the quality of the content, which can put a huge liability on the BeamNG team. While this has been solved in some situations with demo vehicles, its for sure not a permanent fix. And another aspect about the dev standpoint, the team would literally have to design their own form of payment methods, marketplace, UI, and develop a support network so advanced to deal with unhappy people who arent satisfied. I think this is just a really bad idea, and BeamNG should be kept the way that it is. It shouldnt have to change because a list of creators found it to be profitable for them. Thats just my take, sorry for the paragraph lmao. If you think im being an asshole, please keep in mind this in the bottom of the first post: Feel free to react and voice your opinion on this idea. No matter who you are, we need your point of view. We all know this community is great, and now is the time to show it
This should be a key, important part of a system. Lots of details and pictures should be provided otherwise I won't know what the hell I'm throwing my money at which is terrible
The problem of not having any encryption and key system would be that those paid mods would end up on WOM an the likes pretty quickly, as it is already the case
I think total encryption would be a bit overkill, unless you are vouching for encryption in the form of password protection.
Whilst this is an interesting idea, it is inherently a very flawed one. I see two potential ways do this, a completely custom file format, or an encrypted (password-protected) zip file. Now, both methods would protect your mod from being stolen by the average Joe, however someone could still do it. Let's say the developers make a custom file format and encrypt it using AES cryptography. That sounds like a showstopper, but it isn't. The problem here lies with the fact that BeamNG must read the file. As such, both the code to load said file format, and to decrypt it, lies in the game. Someone could, in theory, reverse the game's executable and find it. Then they could reimplement it in a standalone application, and they would be able to access the files. Making this entire process server-side wouldn't really work, either. Because once again, the game must load it. Even someone needs to dump every file manually at runtime, it could still technically be done. Would it be harder? Yes, absolutely. But it would really just become a cat and mouse game in the long run.
I understand the point of view of BeamNG being built off the principals of being able to do whatever you want, and the fact that we will drift away from the general community and more mods would be paid. Plus the stress of the small beamng team trying to verify all these mods would make the development of the actual game go extremely slow. If BeamNG tried to hire people to do this verifying stuff they wouldn't do their jobs well for long (they would judge lazily) and BeamNG would have financial issues with paying people to do the verifying and actual game development. HOWEVER i still believe a paid mod repo is possible if done right. How we do it right is a different issue --- Post updated --- Nobody got the joke (On the off-topic plus side, I just made a 9272 pound d series config)
even with encryption, mods are always gonna end up on a ripped website. it's the same principle that have had people hating drm for years - all you do by making it more difficult to access is encourage piracy. there's a fine line that needs to be found and making it so that people cant edit the mods they paid for is definitely too far towards the direction of people going "to hell with this, i'll just pirate"
It's sort of like Jurassic Park; Life finds a way. Leakers find a way. It's similar to cheaters in an online game, really. An exploiter is able to crash someone's game. The devs patch it. Then they find another method. The devs patch that. But the modders keep discovering ways to cheat just as fast as devs find ways to patch it. A battle of wits, an endurance test
