This week, despite Valve rescinding the ability to monetize mods on the workshop, we still felt that this topic was very important to discuss and I invited back Ken and Charles Amis to the cast to share their thoughts on the matter and what it means for modding down the line.
We started with a brief recap of what happened over last week with Valve instituting purchasable mods and then taking it off. I also reached out to modder Bryan Shannon for his thoughts as he is currently making custom content for Cities: Skylines. After that I asked both Ken and Charles their thoughts on the matter from a modder/consumer and developer perspective respectively.
We talked about some of the major problems with this idea such as Valve dropping this onto a game with an already well established modding community built around free content.
The next topic was talking about whether or not content creators have the right to earn money for their content and the ways to go about it; this lead into a discussion of entitlement and the different mindsets between modders/content creators and the consumer base. The debate over paying for modding is a very tricky one as is the case whenever money comes into the equation and you have to decide between working on a passion project and making something that you can live off of.
For our final topics, we looked at the future. What will be the fallout of this experiment by Valve and when the system will arguably come back, what changes would we like to see?
- Here is my post talking more about the debate of modding monetization and my thoughts on the matter
- For more from Charles here is the Artizens site and steam store page
- Since we talked about donating to content creators, here is my patreon for Game-Wisdom and Bryan Shannon’s patreon for the work he does in Cities: Skylines
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