Last month, Valve and Bethesda pissed a lot of people off with plans to charge for mods. One of the reasons both companies gave for the move was so that mod creators could get paid; a novel idea, but not a new one, since iD Software had been planning something similar twenty years ago.
In an interview with GI.biz, id co-founder John Romero says that in 1995, id had plants to create something called “id Net”, which would “be the portal that players would connect to and play other mod maker’s creations”.
So far so Valve/Bethesda, but where id’s plan differed was in how it was all paid for. Rather than having consumers pay for the mods, id’s plan involved paying the modders directly for the traffic they generated towards the portal site.
That’s a big difference, and one that would have made a huge difference to the perception surrounding the Skyrim debacle.
Of course, that’s assuming that paying modders was Valve and Bethesda’s primary goal and not, you know, the fact they were splitting 75 per cent of the profits between them…
Comments
7 responses to “Doom’s Creators Wanted To Pay Modders… In 1995”
Well, id did end up hiring a bunch of Doom modders to create maps for Doom II, so I suppose they some of them did get paid in the end…
What Bethesda should do is have a website for modders, splitting advertising revenue with them.
What Bethesda should do is hire some playtesters to test thier buggy games before release
I do love Bethesda though, honest
Agreed. Things like SkyUI and Unofficial patches were made by modders to fix the game and make it functional for PC. As if Bethesda and Valve should get 75% for that work.
They do test the games, and they do know about all those bugs.
They just don’t consider them important enough to fix before selling the game. The game needs to ship in September so that means the final code is due June. They just don’t have enough development time to fix it.
Here’s the big thing. What’s “a lot of people”. From what I’ve seen, there’s some people who have nothing to do with modding who make alot of noise. Then there’s some major modders who seem to be trying to digest the whole situation and seeing how they respond.
I don’t think alot of people were pissed of at payment for mods. From a few I’ve heard, they weren’t even that worried about the 75% share issue (granted I don’t know alot of modders so this is a very small sample size).
It’s actually very simple:
People should donate to/compensate modders for time invested into quality results.
People should not charge for mods – it’s questionable the breakdown of payment when companies/studios get involved, and far more importantly it opens a massive can of worms in regards to licensing and legality.
From a legal point of view, the current mod scene is just incompatible with extracting payment. So much of it is based on multiple people’s work (whether it be a studio, or another modder) where nobody minds as long as there’s no money involved. If you do introduce paid mods, the entire scene has to change from the ground up.