I'll surprisingly speak from the opposite end of this and someone who actually invested $5 in paid mods for Skyrim despite not having even loaded the game for... a long time now. Though I am thinking about going back to it.
The way I saw things is that when there are games I like with workshops there rarely seems to be a whole lot of quality content produced for them. Oh sure, it exists, but you have to dig through tons of stuff trying to find them, and any time you put a mod in there is a chance your going to bork up your game big time and simply uninstalling the mod won't always fix it. What's more I see a lot of great seeming, very elaborate, projects get started and then fizzle out without ever being fully worked on or completed because real life interferes and of course it wound up taking a lot longer and more effort than the mod creator realized when they started it.
Being able to make money off of mods struck me as a way of motivating mod creators to work on, and stick with, these long term projects and of course test them and work the bugs out. In the case of what I donated to (there were only a few mods up) I actually gave a buck or so to a couple of people who were creating their own art assets and FX as opposed to just building cookie-cutter with the assembly tool, which to me doesn't mandate any kind of real support since just about anyone can throw an overpowered weapon with a regular skin into a newbie area, or plop down a generic dungeon somewhere.
The thing I was going to push for if this was accepted was for Valve to institute quality control and policing of the sort they needed with Greenlight, especially since Valve was taking a huge cut of the profits. That is to say they would not allow people to charge for unfinished mods or ones under construction, and of course everything in a given mod must be tested and working. This way someone's plans to say recreate the entire city of "Waterdeep" and it's environs based on the PnP D&D maps and fill it with every noted NPC and 50+ quests becomes more practical given the investment of time and effort, and the potential to make money acts as a final motivator, but nobody is going to say stick people with unfinished projects, or sell a mudcrab companion that can fly and one shot dragons.
I can see the potential for the idea if it was dealt with well, of course my big question is of course whether Valve is willing to put in the time and effort to administrate anything. It seems to want to make money off of indie productions by providing a distribution platform for them and taking a cut, but it does not want to take the time to actually police them and ensure quality for the actual consumers.
That's purely my opinion of course. For the most part I do not believe in paying for what passes as general mods, but when it comes to people working on what amount to elaborate expansions, or creating custom art assets and such, that I can see supporting providing creators don't get too greedy. For example if someone did that hypothetical Waterdeep expansion, paying a couple of bucks to reward that effort is not going to be unreasonable, and if the guy can sell 1000 copies of it he's made $2k which isn't bad for a hobby even if he put a couple hundred hours into it. My big fear is of course crap flood, or people deciding they deserve professional prices for simply working on fan made workshop mods, but I figured oversight would be pushed for in time.
That said I guess I'm glad to see the paid mods go because in retrospect the odds of there being any kind of quality control seems minimal, but as I said, it had it's positive aspects.
I'm pretty poor IRL but I don't mind paying a bit to support the things I spend time on. As a result I spend what I can afford in FTP games, and I really don't mind tossing out a donation here and there. Most of the mods I saw all had a "pay what you want" thing anyway. I didn't tinker with it to see if you could set it for a penny or whatever, but it sort of reminded me of the free RPG stuff on say "Drivethru RPG" some of which like "The Void" is pretty decent for what it is.
The way I saw things is that when there are games I like with workshops there rarely seems to be a whole lot of quality content produced for them. Oh sure, it exists, but you have to dig through tons of stuff trying to find them, and any time you put a mod in there is a chance your going to bork up your game big time and simply uninstalling the mod won't always fix it. What's more I see a lot of great seeming, very elaborate, projects get started and then fizzle out without ever being fully worked on or completed because real life interferes and of course it wound up taking a lot longer and more effort than the mod creator realized when they started it.
Being able to make money off of mods struck me as a way of motivating mod creators to work on, and stick with, these long term projects and of course test them and work the bugs out. In the case of what I donated to (there were only a few mods up) I actually gave a buck or so to a couple of people who were creating their own art assets and FX as opposed to just building cookie-cutter with the assembly tool, which to me doesn't mandate any kind of real support since just about anyone can throw an overpowered weapon with a regular skin into a newbie area, or plop down a generic dungeon somewhere.
The thing I was going to push for if this was accepted was for Valve to institute quality control and policing of the sort they needed with Greenlight, especially since Valve was taking a huge cut of the profits. That is to say they would not allow people to charge for unfinished mods or ones under construction, and of course everything in a given mod must be tested and working. This way someone's plans to say recreate the entire city of "Waterdeep" and it's environs based on the PnP D&D maps and fill it with every noted NPC and 50+ quests becomes more practical given the investment of time and effort, and the potential to make money acts as a final motivator, but nobody is going to say stick people with unfinished projects, or sell a mudcrab companion that can fly and one shot dragons.
I can see the potential for the idea if it was dealt with well, of course my big question is of course whether Valve is willing to put in the time and effort to administrate anything. It seems to want to make money off of indie productions by providing a distribution platform for them and taking a cut, but it does not want to take the time to actually police them and ensure quality for the actual consumers.
That's purely my opinion of course. For the most part I do not believe in paying for what passes as general mods, but when it comes to people working on what amount to elaborate expansions, or creating custom art assets and such, that I can see supporting providing creators don't get too greedy. For example if someone did that hypothetical Waterdeep expansion, paying a couple of bucks to reward that effort is not going to be unreasonable, and if the guy can sell 1000 copies of it he's made $2k which isn't bad for a hobby even if he put a couple hundred hours into it. My big fear is of course crap flood, or people deciding they deserve professional prices for simply working on fan made workshop mods, but I figured oversight would be pushed for in time.
That said I guess I'm glad to see the paid mods go because in retrospect the odds of there being any kind of quality control seems minimal, but as I said, it had it's positive aspects.
I'm pretty poor IRL but I don't mind paying a bit to support the things I spend time on. As a result I spend what I can afford in FTP games, and I really don't mind tossing out a donation here and there. Most of the mods I saw all had a "pay what you want" thing anyway. I didn't tinker with it to see if you could set it for a penny or whatever, but it sort of reminded me of the free RPG stuff on say "Drivethru RPG" some of which like "The Void" is pretty decent for what it is.
