Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

From my understanding - a large amount of the hate mail are from people who think mods should be free.

Mod creators could still release their mods for free but could opt into payment if they felt they were deserving of pay. So the people who thought mods should be free could just not purchase any mods for sale. Instead they took to complaining to Steam about opening a venue that might encourage mod development and create more content for everyone.

Correct me if I'm wrong... but it sounds like a bunch of reactionaries got mad over something that would largely only have a positive effect on them. In fear of pissing off its consumer-base, Steam took a step back.

Am I missing something here?

E: Reading through the comments on the scenario. Seems like there was a bit more corporate muckery going on. I'll have to read more, I've only been following this drama loosely.

I have no interest in the issue and have barely skimmed some comments on it, but from what I understand a lot of the problem is the high chance mods will conflict or just not work at all - a game can update at any time and break mods. Paying for something that has no real support is hard to swallow for some people.

In some ways it seems similar to the jailbreak community, and there are paid apps and tweaks there - but it does come at the cost of greatly reduced performance, stability, and security.

Which still doesn't really effect anything.

  a) If the developer wants to continue sales, 
  they must fix their mod to work with future updates. 
  This gives them incentive to keep it up to date.

  b) It's an accepted and known risk that updates 
  might break the mod at time of purchase.

I don't use Steam but I assume it lacks Version Control - so you wouldn't have the option to download an outdated version of a game for mod compatibility. [0]

The ability to sell a mod could incentivize people who would otherwise not create mods.

So here are the two scenarios:

  1) No sales = less content created; same issue of future incompatibility

  2) Sales = more content created; same issue of future incompatibility.

Those who do not wish to risk a mod becoming incompatibility (and unfixably so) could simply not buy any mods that are for sale, choosing to stick with 'free' mods.

The suggested donation-model (optional payments) is how I think most media should run regardless. It seems theres a fair amount of support for a "donation button" instead of the sale model.

[0] Based on nothing but posts from 4 years ago and a quick Google search and the fact that future incompatibility is an apparent issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com