"Skyrim Falskaar Mod Creator Hired By Bungie" - Just a reminder that THIS is what we want for modders; not the pittance Bathesda and Valve are offering.

If you wanted to try to extrapolate a real world comparison, that would be free software under the GPL. The mods may not (all) share the same licensing philosophy, but before Valve's recent change the communities both shared a cooperative spirit of mix, share, and build. The introduction of money doesn't impact free software because the licenses enforce a certain code of conduct such as legally enforceable sharing. The same can't be same for modding as the community rips itself apart, but that is another post.

When a developer contributes code to an open source project, they aren't going to be paid for that. They won't get a share of donations to the project. There is no profit motive of any kind. With that said, many people have been hired from the community as a business adopts the software the person worked on or they want to extend it.. etc. The person was hired because of their work instead of how much profit was made from it. That isn't to say the company hiring isn't looking at profit, but the selection criteria for the position did not include profitability.

I understand your point though. It is an easy metric to select someone with. With that said, I don't necessarily want the great modders to be hired away from the games I love to play. Compensating developers has never been negative. It is simply putting up a paywall between users and developers. A http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques style system where a creative writing a moderately successful comic strip is paid $120,000 per year to continue doing it by people who love the material. That isn't even counting other donations, merchandising, and so on as part of the moderately successful webcomic.

We could be stepping up to sponsor SkyUI for $15,000 - $25,000 per month to pay the developer as much as quarter to half million per year with just a few thousand of us. Instead of that, we're burning the modding community to the ground so Valve can take a 75% cut. No, I don't want to pay Valve 75 cents of every dollar going to a developer. No, I don't want to pay Bethesda again for a 5 year old game and work they had no part of. If Bethesda and Valve want to be paid, they should be selling us The Elder Scrolls 6.

/r/gaming Thread Parent Link - cinemablend.com