Paid Mods (Specifically HL2 Mods)

[vecima]

Hey everyone,

In light of recent HL2 / Source mods that have released as "paid mods" (Prospekt - $10) I started to wonder what everyone here thinks about this?
There are lots of community reactions, everything from "They absolutely should get to charge that money", to "How dare they charge money for a mod, it should be free and they should do it for the love of it".

I get where people come from, but I wanted to gauge us, as a more developer-centric community... where do WE stand on this?

Personally, I stopped working on BOP a long time ago and moved onto making a game that I can actually sell. In light of Valve allowing HL2 modders to sell their work, I'm seriously considering coming back to BOP and seeing if I can get through some of those difficulties. If I were to plan on selling it, that incentive would easily justify my spending the endless hours it takes to do these sorts of projects. The sad truth is, I don't think I can justify it for free any more - I just don't have enough time in the day. So in addition to the question "How do you feel about paid mods in general?", I guess I'm also asking, "How would you feel if I were to resume work on BOP, and plan to sell it on steam?". This is not something I've decided yet, and it may not happen anyway - but in this light it's certainly up for consideration.

[Nicadeamas]

.
Huh. I didn't know about paid mods. Sounds awesome!
Personally I've always thought it was rather crappy of game companies to say "Everything you build with our tools belongs to us."
I think if my creativity and work built something, regardless of the tools I'm using to do it, I should be able to sell that thing.
But on the other hand, it would suck if I had to pay big money to get the tools to build stuff.

If somebody said "How dare they charge money for this mod," and they were talking about my mod, (if I had one) that would be awesome!
Not only would it mean they want to play my mod, but it would mean they were looking forward to it enough to be pissed about not having enough money lol.

That'd be a big compliment. Plus as we all know, making a mod that is that good is really really hard! So much time and work goes into this stuff and most of the people playing it have no idea how hard it is. That in mind, yes, I think we all should be allowed to sell what we make if we want to. I think we should also be allowed to give it away if we want too. (Did I get the too's right?)


Concerning BOP.
Ooo, you know, there are few mods I've seen that look like the HL2 world. Even fewer mods that Look like a higher detail hl2 world. And oh so rare are they that feel like a hl2 world. (That kind of feeling only comes with painstaking NPC scripting.)
But I must say what has amazed me most about BOP is how it looks and feels like a new piece of the HL2 world. Short as it is thus far, it is very well done.

If you were considering continuing work on it, I would be very interested in helping you where I can.
It would take a lot to get our heads back in the stressful source editing world, but that was such a fun world to be in too lol.

On the other hand, there is so much more content available to the modders now then there was then.
The computers are faster too on average. People hardly optimize their maps these days.

Well, off to work projects outside the computer, sighs.


Edit: Dude what have you done to me? Normally I check in here once a week or month, but I've logged on here four times today to check this thread...

[vecima]

Haha,
Yeah I'm like seriously feeling the need to come back here more often. I've neglected this place for too long.
Thanks for the awesomely kind words, re: BOP!
It certainly was painstaking work for several years, and that didn't even get it to completion. I played through it again recently to see where I left it, and there's a lot of rough spots I remember being stuck on, and some rough spots I don't even remember from before. But there's also some stuff in there that's really well done. I'd really like to see it through. That said I'm not yet planning on coming back to work on this at the moment. Just feeling out the idea.