This is what really baffles me. Everyone agrees that SkyUI is fantastic and an essential addition to vanilla Skyrim. The creators did an awesome job and in my opinion they fully deserve the one measly dollar that the mod will cost at minimum. And yes, Bethesda and Valve also deserve a cut for providing the base game, the tools and the infrastructure.
You're crazy if you think they deserve money for having other people fix their pathetic console UI for them.
Modding was the last innocent corner of gaming btw.
The one little socialist community island created by hobbyists in an industry ocean driven by greed, conflict of interest, risk aversion and opportunity cost.
The one environment where creativity is not stifled and that allows niches to be filled regardless of their commercial viability. The one area of gaming that people treated as a hobby instead of a job, and everyone was happy living like that.
But no, valve had to build an oil rig on it, and some people are dumb enough to cheer that on, because apparently a niche like modding is not allowed to exist, and it should be picked apart when there is money to be made.
Because that is all that matters in this world, money.
I know! Maybe with enough money we can build a nature reserve to try to preserve the modding scene (which was healthy and the integrity of which was under no threat just a few days ago) We can hire guards to protect it from poachers like bethesda (and ea and ubisoft and all the others) and write articles in newspapers like we do about white rhinos.
What's especially baffling is the complete lack of foresight and the naivety of the people who are willing or even eager to let modding get monetized.
edit, people like this
Bunch of weird comments here. You realize that even before this the market was dictating how many mods were made right? People still have to eat no matter what, so if mods don't pay for food, less mods can be made.
Why do more mods have to be made? why does it matter if some don't get made? What matters is the environment in which mods are made. (a unique environment that no longer exists anywhere else in gaming)
You're willing to throw the baby away with the bathwater and you don't even see it.
People saying 'let the market sort it out' are
1: naive as fuck , if they think modding is going to a better place once money and corporate interests become involved
2: completely and utterly missing the point that modding has been something that exists OUTSIDE of market forces, and that that is what made it valuable
Somehow people are too short sighted to understand the second point.
There is literally nothing to be gained from trying to make modding more like regular game development.
You don't try to make cheese more like meat, there's already mountains of meat to choose from. Let cheese be cheese.
And the shitty narrative that modders are starving helpless creatures that need to be saved by big corporations, and that it's okay to exploit them and ruin the core concepts of modding because it's better than nothing is insane.
We don't have to buy mods?
They don't have to make them.
If you can't do it as a hobby or a community thing because you'll be poor and starve then go do contract work? Get a job in the industry? and if you can't find a job in the industry do like everyone else on the planet and find employment elsewhere.
Why you thought to begin with that making free community content was a way to sustain yourself is baffling.
I don't complain that the football tournaments I set up with my old highschool friends aren't paying my rent. Guild masters in frigging MMOs don't complain that they can't pay their rent with the 20 odd hours they put into organising shit every week.
Because that is what a community effort is, a labor of love, for the benifit of the community and the people organising it.
They do it because they want to, and it's a way for them to get satisfaction and meaning in their lives, and that + the positive effect on other people's lives and the gratitude of those people is enough for them. *
*now if you read the asterixed paragraph and your instinct is to call me entitled or you can't understand my sentiments on this then read on
Here I'm going to go on a non gaming related tangent and get to the point that pisses me off.
It's not about modding or gaming, both could die in a fire tomrorow and I would move on to something else, life goes on.
It's this completely fucked up culture that exists in the west these days, where everything revolves around money and western capitalism pushes out any form of community sense.
90 percent of what makes life worth living and that makes humanity beautiful and its existance worthwhile is built by communities, and much of it is being destroyed by greed.
This bethesda modding thing is just the most recent of thousands of examples (and just happens to be gaming relating)
Some people in western capitalist culture hold no value to a sense of community or selfless cooperation to make the world better.
They live for money and think vapid consumerism will bring them happyness and fill the void in their life.
And in that pursuit they are willing to compromise and destroy everything that could actually bring them and others happyness.
The level of vapid consumerism and messed up values caused by capitalism taken to an unhealthy extreme can be unbearable sometimes on neogaf
And this is what I'm seeing here, a fucked up culture barging in on a healthy fan driven niche of gaming and destroying and exploiting it, and somehow thinking it has the right to do so.
It doesn't.
