Patreon, Paid mods & BeamNG.drive

Well according to me, There should be both mods, paid and free, like I have no problem with paid mods unless they are overpriced but I always ask them to create like both paid and free mods ON A BALANCED LEVEL. So that people like us can also enjoy the some high quality free mods. I mean they are there but on a rare case. Most of the mods are paid nowadays. They should balance the amount of paid and free mods. Some of those cool real life cars can be free and some paid. Just imagine if a mod is 3 US dollars. He sells 100 units. So he gets 300 US dollars out of that mod and just subtract the money he had to pay to get the model and stuff. Lets say it all was of like 110-120 USD. So how much left with him? 180-190 USD. Now lets say he creates a free mod but one of those cool real life cars. Lets assume the modder had to pay like 100 USD, so he still made the profit of 80-90 USD. I mean profit is profit. The point is that modders who make paid mods can do A LITTLE BIT less profit. Now I do know that mods get leaked and we have to get used to it because it is something we can't control. Whether it is paid or free mod. They will get leaked. It's the story with all car simulation games. My point is that there should be a balance. They should balance highly detailed paid and free mods with SAME EFFORT. Like a modder can one time make free mod and the other time make paid one. They should do it like this IN MY OPINION. If they have skills people will buy their mods and even after making one real life modern car cool free mod they may make profit, Less but still they can. Like this they also will get paid for their hardwork and the ones who love free mods may also be happy with this. Its the thing of balancing it. Don't just make all the mods paid continuously. You can make some free ones if you go with a well-planned structure. I know it takes time to make mods but it always takes time for some good things to be created you know.. BeamNG also wasn't created in a day.
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Most paid mods are the price of a crappy sandwich from a fast food outlet. Get over it, it's not much to ask the price of a starbucks coffee for mod access. There's nothing inherently evil about indie artists putting their work on a paid platform. And yes, the high quality mod creators I think count as artists.

 

Hello to all.
already, sorry for my bad english.

I decided to start making an offroad map on BeamNG two months ago because the gameplay of the game is incredible and I plan to ask for financial help by a means that I haven't defined yet (first screenshot of the project here : https://i.ibb.co/PMw77ch/G98x6c-Rqb-K.jpg ) if and only if I manage to release content that I consider qualitative enough to ask for a participation.

I don't have any enrichment goals, but it's an occupation that can be expensive, I'll detail it:

- To make heightmaps in high resolution and tiled (to get a result like the one of johnson valley), world machine pro costs 300 euros (the standard version does not propose tiled projects).
- For asset texturing, the fastest way is to use Substance painter / substance designer and both cost 250 euros (quixel is free only for Unreal Engine Projects).
- For retouching and creating bitmaps, I use affinity photos and affinity designers (cheaper than photoshop / illustrator) which cost about 100 dollars).
- For asset modeling: blender is free.

After that, you potentially have to add licenses for materials (9 dollars of assets for rocks) or additional tools like a good remesher for blender (60 dollars).

In short, to try to achieve a potentially professional level result (which I would dream of achieving), it can be quite expensive in tools.

So as I was saying, as much as I would like to offer it for free, I would also like to be able to, at least temporarily, manage to amortize the investment in tools which have two effects: an improvement of the general quality (to motivate people to help me and also to force me to try to reach a sufficient quality for the commitment of the donors) and especially an accentuation of the production speed.

Well, I was just posting this to give an idea of how much it can cost just to make maps. So yes, you can probably do it with cheaper tools, but in an already time-consuming hobby, good tools are also more motivating and save a lot of time.

 

Going to give you suggestion, use ArmorPaint (while it's paid, but it's open source so you can build it with no cost, or use somebody else's prebuilt binaries)

 

My only thought so far on Paid Mods is that Players that only enjoy the multiplayer part of the game cannot enjoy paid mods with others easiely. As the server owners can legally not host the actual paid mods.

While there are requests for paid mod support on multiplayer like this: https://github.com/BeamMP/BeamMP/issues/288 (which is hopefully be integrated) and ways like this:

Both attempts come with the issue of players maybe having different versions of the mod. After all the player has to go himself onto a website and download the latest version, instead of how it is with the repo automatically downloading the latest versions. In the multiplayer scenario the mod version on the server are inherited on the client, but both so far thought out ways to integrate paid mod support into multiplayer cannot resolve the version issue, as the server in both cases cannot distribute the version it wants its players to have for the legal reasons.

 

I see all of the arguments here being similar -

If mod is good (like picnic, mondello, and signia) people would be fine with paying.
Anything below this quality and it's not acceptable as a paid mod such as basically all of the ones on modland...

But they must be EXEPTIONAL to be paid. Anything below this is unacceptable.

Makes enough sense to me.

 

Bruh

 

modding in general is a passion project, doing which you dont work towards the final goal of getting paid, but i strongly believe that people need to be able to donate if they have spare money and they really enjoy the mod, which i have personally done quite a few times.
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this has to be the most schizo take i have ever seen
if you make a paid mod, the free one is mostly the paid one but stripped of certain features which make it worth the money, as for example the picnic or the durham.
i dont understand why you emphasise the balance so much, i personally havent seen a singular case of there being a significantly shittier version of a paid mod released as free by any creator. also, the profit thing or whatever which you mentioned is so schizophrenic and out of place its not even funny

 

Here's my opinion on this.
While I think it is justified for high or dev quality mods to be paid (up to some point), I'm still not for paid content. Why? Well, it seems to me that paid mods are essentially like an opening of a Pandora box. Following the introduction of some mods that are truly high quality and deserve every single cent (and aren't that expensive frankly), some other mods appeared, which aren't as good as those I've mentioned. For example, you have a guy who makes essentially meshslaps, with some edits to make it more appealing, such as working lights, PBR, multiple versions, edited JBEAM, etc. That wouldn't be problem if the mod is free. Well, it's not. Some of those mild quality mods were priced around 7-8 euros. Yes, meshslaps priced 2 times more than dev quality mod such as LucasBE's Cherrier Picnic. Absolutely crazy. The creators of those expensive, but not quality made mods are usually people who essentially have low skills for modding, but are especially greedy for money. It wouldn't be bad if they if they were priced really cheaply, like 1 euro or 50 cent. Yet, paying 7 or 8 euros for that is absolutely idiotic.

Long story short, the biggest problem about paid mods is that they will encourage many people who don't have enough skills for modding to make paid not enough quality mods, in most cases far too overpriced.

 

You know what is the REAL downside of paid mods? It further divides the community. I mean look at this thread, NINE pages of arguing about this crap. There's too much pretention on this forum to begin with, and this doesn't help.

 

Now THIS is a new take, and my favourite thus far. And it isn't even only these pages, there's like five threads of this garbage! It's rare that a drama-less time comes about on the forums, really sucks.

 

Look i allready got some paid mod (Not on BeamNG) like Content manager on assetto corsa to be able to have my server manager at the same place as i go to play wich is 2USD ( I Gave 5USD) or Custom shader patch because it change the whole engine and graphics for 1Cad (I give 3Cad a month) a month allright been one year that im subscribe to the patreon of that guy and you know what im happy to say that i paid for those thing but a car in a game i don't think its the same, Little to no Update what i would rather instead of dividing the community as @monobrau said. maybe like the Durham having paid Addon and we are not talking ab 5USD, 5 USD is way too much for a car IG especially for a sandbox game, ain't gonna lie i found the picnic and the montebello and after 1 day of use i completely ditch them never used them again i had more fun with the Ibishu Saga and other because obviously it feels great to drive and mostly free,

For me getting paid for a mod im all for it but there's a point
I would rather having a patreon to support for early version and the finish version is free
Or a low price patreon page for Addons of free mod, when i say addons i'm not talking like one addon 1$ nah that is greedy im talking a addon pack

What paid mod do to the communauty :

It divided them on lets say Multiplayer mods, Close and or open competition
Need to play it to have money worth (EX: I Should use that mod because i paid it) (I saw some people like that)
Co-existence is almost none with free mod because we see more the thread of paid mod then free quality mod, and other people will start to take that idea for granted and try to make you pay some buggy mess
Make's some people brag about the fact they paid mod's and discriminate other that don't


TL;DR

Paying for supporting a modder that does actually gamechanging things is something that im okay with like CSP on assetto corsa witch all free but if you want WIP rain FX you need to pay 1$ a month
Not a paid full pledge mod, paid addon instead and we are talking ab a full addon pack not just one addon
If no addon's are planned just put your patreon so people that want to donate can and people that can't or dont want to can still play with it
It Divide the community like @monobrau said
Co-existing with free mod is almost none since it bloat the listing of mods, and some people will take that idea for granted to do bad paid mod.
Some people Bragging about paying for mods and discriminate others because they don't




PS

I do not mind at all the fact that you can have paid addon or paid early acess, but a full pledge mod on a community where mods has been free for almost its entire time,

What i actually do mind (Idc for myself, I dont like i pass) its how the community can divide themself just because that, look like a small thing but its install to one server that someone that i know made he didn't wanted me to join because that mod was there, how it can actually grab the forum listing and hide alot of good mod doesn't not seem like it but it can as myself being in that loop hole of searching specific mod and i mostly came across the paid mod first, what a mood changer really



(EDIT)
I would rather support for helping somebody that learn how to do quality mod if they deliver a free mod
Then paying for a mod that will last 1-2 year of supported update of bugfix at most

Sorry for the mess my writing is atm first im not an native english speaker and i see alot of unconsistency in my sentence and im lazy to edit the whole thing
the TLDR is more well written

 

This morning was the fastest I've gotten angry on this forum. Two minutes. Two minutes from being in a good mood to infuriated. I looked at this post about paid mods, and I see a poll. You know what makes me angry? It's the most heavily biased form I've seen. Every question it asks is neutral AT THE LEAST. Every question on this form is leading you to respond positively to it. It's objectively terrible and unbalanced. Several multi-paged threads about this topic disprove this second questions relevance immediately, INCLUDING THE ONE MADE FOR IT.


No where in this google form does it hint about ANY consequence of paid vs unpaid. It doesn't even ask something like "does paid mods negatively affect the community?" it only assumes you're okay with it. Clearly there was no attempt for any neutrality in that google form. Of course in retrospect this isn't unexpected. It's like if Nvidia asked the public through poll if they liked the new gpu's, while neglecting to ask any questions about the pricing. It's tone deaf.

Speaking of deaf ears, what's with the lack of transparency with the paid mods? Are you all 'too busy' making the mod to tell us what you are doing? Can I trust them to update the mod over the years? How accurate is the suspension geometry compared to the real thing and is it provable? There are mods of games that completely revamp the whole game that are more professionally put together. Sometimes they are even free. I'm talking about mods like Richard Burns rally, where there is muliplayer support with 20gb of FREE content, Assetto Corsa content manager and CSP, the former having prerelease model. YES, the content is quality here, but those has an air of professionality.

If you guys are going to taut yourself as "developer quality", it doesn't mean just your content. It means that you, the developer, is offering paid content that is up for public scrutiny. Even your past. Selling things doesn't mean you're superior to others either. Despite this, almost non of this mods even have a TOS, or even a license. A legal license like gnu public license. Where is it?


EDIT:

They are totally right. We're making unlicensed mods for a videogame. There's free content with more addons, and even free mods with paid addons with more content than some of these paid only mods. I don't understand why anybody wouldn't do it like these two ways. They are so much better and less toxic for the community. Why would anyone go out of their way to NOT release a MOD for a game and NOT let people play it without a pay wall? I get making mods are hard for beamng, but for gods sake, expecting everyone to pay a mod once is like expecting people not to pirate beamng. It's just for control at this point, and it promotes backwards growth for the community.
maybe like the Durham having paid Addon

 

I still don't see how paid mods are bad for the community or "divides it" in any way. Would appreciate it if you could elaborate on this

 

The amount of drama it causes?

 

You should maybe read mine i adressed it in my post on how it can divide community.

Totally you said much more then just how it can divide the community

 

I'd say that constant arguing over it stirred up much more drama than the mods themselves. After all, the number of paid mods (at least here, on the official forum) is relatively low, so with those very few we could have ended it with something like nobody is asking you to buy it, you can either pay those $5, use the demo, or cope.

Instead, we're arguing on something we actually have already made a consensus on – $3 for a standalone car is okay-ish, $10 for a meshslap never will be. Yet, there's always someone complaining and the sad show goes on.

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On a side note, aren't the mods on the forum released under some sort of license by default?

 

The author of the Cherrier Picnic, a paid mod that spawned weeks of drama and debate on the subject, doesn't see how it divides the community?

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Sure is: https://beamng.com/game/support/pol...ng-and-other-users-for-user-generated-content

Interestingly, if I understand it right making a release thread for a paid mod means it can only be subject to the same license: