Poll: Should Modders be allowed to charge for their mods / maps?

[Eclectic Dreck]

As a rule, no. Because they are building upon another product, I see no reason why they ought to be allowed to sell their work without going through the proper channels for permissions and whatnot. Should the product owner allow them to sell their work, the product owner ought to at least ensure there is some measure of quality standard (That the product even works for example) as this at least provides some measure of quality control.

 

[oktalist]

This attitude you guys have is very wasteful. It forces every professional developer to work on building an AAA game from scratch. It would be more efficient if some worked on full games while others made interesting content within other games. Professional third party bugfixing would also be pretty cool.

Open source games FTW.

 

[Allspice]

I thought they already did...then again my only experience with mods was when I was looking around for some good sites for Sims 3 mods and a few I ran across charged a subscription fee to have access to everything. :shrug:

 

[burningdragoon]

I would not object as long as a few conditions were met:

1) There are official modding kit. I know at least Bethesda releases this.

2) Some sort of contract is made with the original developers. Either licensing the permission (for some amount of money) or the original devs get a cut.

100% in favor of the donation/ad based options available now.

 

[Speakercone]

As a rule, no. Because they are building upon another product, I see no reason why they ought to be allowed to sell their work without going through the proper channels for permissions and whatnot. Should the product owner allow them to sell their work, the product owner ought to at least ensure there is some measure of quality standard (That the product even works for example) as this at least provides some measure of quality control.

Agreed entirely, sir.

I also see no reason for a developer not to enter into some sort of royalty agreement with a modder whereby both parties receive some money from sales of the mod. Ideally the developer or publisher could lend some marketing support to it. It could be an interesting secondary revenue stream from their IP.

On another note, TotalBiscuit recently answered a question about modders in his Mailbox series of YouTube videos. He stated that every developer hopes to find the next DotA, so it is in their interests to not only support modders, but to actively encourage them.

 

[Bobbity]

Not unless the sale was through the dev itself, the prices were far from expensive, the dev recieved the greater part of the profits, only for large scale cogent mods, and the modder would have to opt in.

So basically mods - only large scale content ones - sold as DLC for a dollar or two, with the dev earning a percentage of the modder's work.

Or we could just stick with ads. Whatever works, really.

 

[EcoHulk]

No since they used free software to make the mod. Made even worse by the fact that its a game belonging to some developer that they are editing with to make themselves a profit.