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Make Money from Mods? Studying Motivations for Content Creation (Forums : Development Banter : Make Money from Mods? Studying Motivations for Content Creation) Locked
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Apr 1 2015 Anchor

Greetings!
What made you decide to create and share content for video games? Money, reputation, making friends, because it's fun? This is what we are studying!

Answers have been collected! The questionnaire is NOT collecting answers for the paper anymore, but is still available for anyone who wants to fill it in anyway.

Click here for the Survey

Regards
Eric & Joakim

Edited by: ersa0

Apr 3 2015 Anchor

You could focus your paper on how modding changed from a community activity to an exploit with the arrival of asset stores. If you model for a mod now, you cannot be sure that your model will actually end up in the project. Someone might steal them or bundle them and sell them on his own behalf. I think the monetarisation is flawed, because first of all you cannot prove ownership easily. Second of all EPIC and Unity and the likes make us labor much to hard for the measly profits from their assets stores. To sell that kind of volume it requires to live would need professional organisation and a group of people; just so you stay on top of the store's popularity list. And then it is a professional development team, yet still gets payed less than any 3D job used to do. I feel like the engine manufacturers have found a way to get cheap labor and call it "community driven" projects.

It's frustrating making mods now, because eveyone wants results in a year (or better yet: two months). And coders do their job, modelers theirs, but never really work in line. The problem these days is that every Mod dreams of being an Indie game and making profit. Chaos, laymanship and confusion are often part of the creative process. I wish there still was a place for mods, because there are a few good olds ones, like PVK2, NMRIH, FFOF, but they have been developed since shortly after Half-Life 2. I don't know any recent mod developments. I see lot of cosmetical updates on Steam for games like Counter Strike GO; everyone tries to sell some crap on the workshop. What we call "mods" these days are often no more than uploads from an ingame editor, i.e. player created content. True modding, in the terms of total conversions has died a couple of years ago. Everything left now is an indie movement that tries to put projects in Alpha Status in oder to monetarize them. If or not the game is ever finished is debatable.

I feel we would profit from "real" mods, as it would mean a commitment for the sake of the project, not for individual or monetary gain. However, that kind of cooperation would require a proper site to manage projects like these. And Moddb for the past ten years and counting has been in denial of doing anything of the kind. Sure, we got new stuff to do on this website. But we didn't really get the tools to make matches with our dream team and project. They pop up, stay around for a while and die. When was the last mod released you found worth mentioning. And was it a Source Engine mod? Most likely it has been in development longer than you think...

Edited by: SinKing

Apr 8 2015 Anchor

The aspect you cover is interesting! I always wonder why other people create mods. Me=? I do it mostly for fun and a activity to pass time, but i guess nowadays people also tend to do it for money. But the questions also involved other people, haven't thought of that aspect before, of course i upload my post and hopefully it help someone but usually i only create it for myself and my pleasure.

SinKing what a review :flame: . But you totaly right, steam and other websites are overflowing with low end mods, although they have implemented a share profit system). But i still feel there is a market for "real" modding, i mean success like icefrog can't be denied. Further skyrim and other games allows you to do so much fun.

Hope your study get some nice result and that u can find implications how to improve UGC. I would almost wanna take part of what your result will be! is it possible to read your paper someday?!!

Apr 8 2015 Anchor

Very interesting, I understand it must be difficult to find motivation to mod when you feel like cheap or free labour under the name of "community driven projects".

From your perception, what games or developers, provide accurate compensation for modding?

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No pressure!
...But this week is the last chance to fill the survey.
We appreciate your contribution to our study.

Best
/Eric

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All data is now being collected and analyzed!
We thank you for participating in this survey, and will keep this thread updated.
Please feel welcome to write on this thread while the paper is being finished!

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Survey stays up!
We decide it couldn't hurt to get some more responses so why not open up the questionnaire again.
If you haven’t answered before, please do so.

Edited by: ersa0

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