Bro, it's only 8.99 Euros. That is a meal. If people don't want to support mods, they will die some day. Simple. The fact that he isn't working for a company or a studio alone is a reason to ask for a higher price, because it's not mass production and he can't live from it. Bruh. 9 Euros... you make me speachless. He is doing what you want and what you don't want to learn and spend time into. So hard to apperciate work? The reason more people are doing paid mods is because video games are becoming more and more complex, expecially simulators like this one, while also the cost of living is rising and people in general can no longer afford anything from their actual professional activity. And to be real, it's also kinda stupid to do it for free any way. That's about a good will from the person, but you can't force that. Meanwhile mods that are released for free get ripped later on to appear in other games under a paywall or in advertisement CGI renders when the models are floating around. So everyone get's money but not the creator it'self.
Thank you very much for these words! For some people 8.99Euro can be too much, I can understand, but what about those on Patreon asking 15$ monthly for random deliveries?? The point is that there you cannot complain, you can just pay or pass over. To me it is the market to decide if the price is adequate or not. We are not talking about bread and milk, people can renounce to a mod if too expensive I guess? The real discussion here is not the price amount, but the concept of paid mod. And it is completely worthless to complain about that with modders: sorry but I won't change my policy. It should be discussed with forum admins and obtain interdiction of paid mods. Like it has been done with official Facebook page. T.
Damn that's a big bump but unfortunately I still hold the record with a 5 year bump, get good kid. Also he doesn't wanna do that because you can get refunds through gumroad so he sticks to the sketchy payment methods that don't allow refunds or chargebacks.
I don't understand how bumps work because for me anything about a year old, gives me an error saying it's too old to bump and that I need to make a new thread.
You know, it's a real shame... back then paid mods were just a couple at a time, you know? Particularly just from LucasBE and what have you. But nowadays as I've been delving into the paid modding scene, there's so much shitty mods it's insane. Like I've been looking at a ton of mod authors and probably thousands of paid mods now, and only a couple of them were good quality. The rest are often so bad that even Russian bootlegs somehow have better quality. A few of them even had just straight-up copied jbeams from other cars. This is why I have such an issue with paid mods; there's no quality control whatsoever. With free mods (and especially mod demos), you're not risking anything by trying it. With paid mods however, nobody knows if a mod is good or bad until at least one person has paid the price and downloaded it. Only then do people realize it's bad. Either that or a modder has a track record already of poorly-made mods. As someone who's delved into the paid mod world, it appears that only 5% of paid mods are good and the rest are just... hot garbage. I mean the fact that paid mods are somehow worse quality than bootlegs and meshslaps is impressive in itself. But I can't imagine spending the price of the entire game ($25) plus an extra $5 total, for a single car mod or a rim pack. Especially one with such shit quality. In fact at the time of writing this post I just came across a single config car that's $45. The hell are these people smoking? I came across a Honda NSX which is supposed to have a high-revving V6, and in actuality, it instead had a slow and basic SOHC I4 from either a Covet or Pessima, which suffers overrev damage past 6,000 RPM. This really wasn't an issue back then, because when it came to paid mods, it was only like a couple, like from LucasBE and a couple other authors, and that was basically it. But nowadays, if I had to guess, paid mods probably have already taken up about 75% of the modded content in BeamNG, as well as a couple other games. Especially as more and more modders realize "why put effort into a free mod when I can just slap a model in with zero effort and make a quick buck?" Like even bootleg mods back then weren't that bad, yeah a lot of them had shitty/duplicate jbeams from other cars, but there were a handful I remember that... were actually pretty decent. They weren't exactly the most polished thing imaginable, or even polished at all, but with some mods you could tell the creators at least tried. And while nobody's pointing a gun to your head and forcing you to buy mods, that's besides the point; yeah we'll always have some free mods, but the more paid mods that exist, the less free ones, and it's starting to get to a point now where if you basically want a mod that's guaranteed to be great quality, you'll probably have to resort to paying for it (when you can find a good quality paid mod in the first place), because anything anything less is more the kind of thing you might find on the repo or forums. And not that these repo/forum mods are shit, because they're clearly not, but it will eventually get to a point in the near future where people will make lower effort mods for free and post them there, and if you want something with effort put in, it'll be a paid-only mod. But like... hmm, let me try to provide an example. So let's look at the repo and BeamNG forums. When it comes to vehicle stuff, what primarily makes up these two places? Usually packs of a couple engines and/or transmissions, some smaller part packs, and configuration packs for existing vehicles, right? KLJP exists with a lot of content sure, but it's still at the end of the day just configurations being added to the existing vanilla vehicles, usually just different markets (EUDM, JDM, USDM) and facelifts/expansions. Now, how many separate car mods are there? Mods that are their own entirely isolated car that isn't a configuration or body type for an existing vehicle? You'd soon realize, probably not nearly as many. Especially lore-friendly stuff. Now look at paid mods and look at how many exist there in comparison. And this is just car mods, this doesn't include levels and other things too. It's basically microtransactions; unofficial DLC from unofficial developers. Yeah, a car might be $2 dollars. And so is this map. And so is this wheel pack. Oop, next thing you know you've accumulated a total spending of about $100 (exaggerated but it's for a reason) total for a $25 game solely on mods. And again, while you're not forced to buy these mods, that's entirely besides the point. It's more the principle itself that matters. Also, surely there must be legal issues with this. Lore-friendly mods are one thing (in fact lore-friendly mods are probably the only good paid mods, if a licensed car mod is paid that's usually a dead ringer that it's probably a bad mod), but not only are these paid mods scamming people with terrible quality, but just the premise at all that they're able to make money off of licensed brands and/or stolen video game assets (like Forza), surely that's illegal, no? When you purchase a mod too, what happens if an update to the game breaks it? Mod authors will sometimes update the mod, but you're at the mercy of the developer and they may not always do such. In fact, technically you bought the product "as-is" and they don't have to fix it if it breaks. With free mods, people can make their own fan patches and what-have-you. And that's usually the case. Remember when I asked how many individual car mods you could spot on the forums or repo? Especially with licensed cars, open their threads on the forums, and look at how many of them are outdated mods, but people submit their own patches/download posts that fix it. Or also entirely new threads for existing car mods where someone else picked up on the work for it. If it weren't for these people, we'd have significantly less free car mods. Because there's a lot of free car mods that are abandoned or get updated so rarely by their respective authors, that the mods often don't work without these patches. With paid mods, you can't really do this, because you'd be distributing paid content, or at least parts of it. I've always thought of modding as more of a hobby, because it's always been that way, I really don't think people should be trying to make an entire career out of it. Not that people can't make some money from it, but there's always better ways of doing so. People didn't make mods because they made money from it, they made mods because they just enjoyed making them, it was a passion project kind of thing. The greatest example of this is Half-Life. Look at how many Half-Life mods are out there, and how many are still being made 25 years later. Entropy : Zero 2 absolutely blew the Half-Life 2 modding scene out of the water and it's a free mod. I'm sure Breadman made money from a Patreon or something for his mod, but he didn't make the mod with finances in mind. He made it because he likes Source mods and the modding community. So much so in fact, that he's even helped to develop tools and other templates to make modding easier for people or make new and interesting techniques. All-in-all, what he's been doing means that everyone benefits in the long run and not just him. And that's what I want to see more of these days; collaboration. Modders now always have so much drama and often wall themselves off from each other, I'd love to see people start working together to improve our favorite games and help create new tools and templates to improve mods in a way that all other modders and players can benefit. Donations have always been a thing, I used to make a fair bit as a kid from some of my game mods. Not much mind you, but people still took the time to say "thanks" and gave a buck or two. But people didn't have to. But the option was at least there for those who chose to, and if people didn't want to pay, that's fine. I think the best "win-win" scenario is Paid Early Access where a mod is paid during development but then gets released for free once it's finished. It seems to be the best scenario and some people appear to make quite a bit just from Patreons. Either that, or getting commissioned, and having people pay you to make a specific mod. Which is especially useful because I know a lot of modders hate being bothered by people asking for free suggestions, and getting commissioned by someone with money to make something instead is a good incentive. Especially assuming most of those mods will be publicly available after they're done. Not to mention how many people are using paid stuff now to gatekeep people. A lot of modders are tired of harassment and destructive criticism, or as I said before, being pestered with suggestions. And while I totally understand that aspect of it because I've dealt with it myself, making your mods paid or only available on your Patreon to gatekeep the bad actors is not going to solve the problem, in fact I'd argue it makes it worse. BeamNG mods also take a while to make. Also understandable, but a lot of games take a while to make mods. That's just... how modding works, unfortunately. Look at how many Source mods exist. There's an abundance of them, but they're certainly not even remotely easy to make. Tools can certainly be made to streamline the process at least, but it's still always going to be a hassle. As a modder, that's a factor you simply know you'll have to consider. If people truly want to make money off of their creations, the next best step would probably be proper game development. Because at least then, you're not just selling a single car, but you're selling a full experience from start to finish. That's something you can actually make a career out of. If you really enjoy making game mods, try delving into game development and see what you can come up with! You may surprise yourself with how much you might be capable of. In fact there's a lot of modders now who are doing exactly that, and it's really amazing what people can do. Again look at Source mods. There's a lot of skin and model mods for Half-Life 2 but then there's also all these people making entire freakin' game mods with their own stories and gameplay! That's something definitely worth buying or supporting. But I don't feel there's a need to purchase a mod that replaces Combine Soldiers with something else. But I can certainly donate some cash if I feel that it's polished enough and I like it enough. If we really have to start doing paid mods, then we need to find a way to provide any kind of quality control. Because let's be real: this is getting ridiculous, and I'm tired of seeing people fall into scam after scam after scam and letting a lot of these mod authors get away with that. But like I said, some of the best win-win methods I can see is paying for commissions instead of suggestions, and doing Paid Early Access instead of outright purchases.
Not really lol. Apologies. Whenever I make an argument on something I typically try to cover as many bases as I can.
I may be late but even though I hate paid mods, there should be no point on pirating mods like this, just because it's paid.
I think it depends, mainly with how trustworthy the mod author is. When you pay for a mod you never know what you're going to get and it's often worsened because with some paid mod sites, they state that all transactions are final (in other words, no refunds). But dude, what makes this stuff so bad is that besides a select handful of mods, the other like 90-95% of paid mods are so utterly garbage in quality. There are more than plenty of YouTube videos out there showcasing exactly that. Missing textures, stolen jbeams, one car mod I saw even spawned in as just a pair of wheels and you had to manually select every individual part in Parts Selector, and when it was finally put together it looked like ass. Most paid mods get pirated specifically because somebody paid for it and realized how much they got ripped off, so they leak it. Not to mention how expensive a lot of mods are for no particular reason. While the few good mods are a couple dollars in nature at most, a lot of other mods can be anywhere between $20-50 and that's insane to me. So as much as I hate to admit it, and especially because we have so little control over the situation, piracy may be one of the few reasonable options we have. All I'm saying is with how bad it's getting, something's going to give eventually, and we need to do something about that. Because if we don't, then the outlook on BeamNG's modding future looks very grim indeed. And if you don't believe me, then look at Minecraft Bedrock and Bethesda's paid Skyrim and Fallout mods, and how well that's been received over the years. Minecraft is especially bad because I've seen so many mods get stolen from mod authors and put up on the marketplace for a quick buck, like the Aether mod. And this is when a game officially supports/advocates for it, so imagine how bad it gets when it's unofficial. As others have expressed in almost hundreds of other communities, selling mods as a product basically almost destroys modding as a whole, and what made mods so great in the first place. We've seen it happen before practically a decade ago when people were first testing the waters, and it's still very much an issue today.
