Gamespot, I appreciate you trying to do more PC-centric articles, but your builds always seem to waste money. There's just no reason for a CPU cooler unless you're overclocking--and in which case why didn't you go with a K CPU? The case, mobo and PSU all seem needlessly expensive. Adjust those prices and you can get closer to $1000. Which is still a lot for mid-range, but a good bit more stomachable.
@fanirama: You're clearly not a PC gamer. You're a sad person who feels the need to justify being a console gamer with outright lies about the price and longevity of PC parts. Look, if you want to be a console gamer, just be a console gamer. You really shouldn't have to justify it. Just enjoy it. You shouldn't feel the need to pretend to be what you aren't and what you clearly know nothing about just so you can feel better about gaming on consoles.
@analgrin: I never said it won't be good. I said I won't pay for it.
Now, as a matter of fact, I am not convinced that it will be good for the community in the long run. While money can cause mod makers to polish their vision to a brilliant shine, it can just as easily push them to adopt the worst habits of AAA devs. So, instead of creating a few pieces of high-quality but hard to produce content, they might focus on producing lots of unexceptional but easy-to-produce content with fairly wide appeal. We see this happen all the time with big studios. Moreover, it is exactly this strategy that has helped some DOTA 2 modders make a career out of modding.
Alternatively, it might be that rather than try to make their mod better than the free alternatives, they might just move on to the next project. After all, sales (and mod downloads) are usually front-loaded, so why (from a monetary point of view) should they continue to improve a mod that is never going to sell as well as it already has? Again, we see this with devs all the time: game releases buggy and instead of fixing it, devs move on to the next, more profitable venture.
Aside from these two ways that money might affect the aims of mod-makers, it also provides two additional difficulties in creating mods that are better than their free alternatives. Problem 1: collaboration. SkyUI lists 15--fifteen!--additional modders in its credits. Is that collaboration happening when money's on the line? Not without a cut. And some modders (like Gopher, credited by SkyUI) don't support paid mods and might hesitate to collaborate. (We saw a similar thing problem arise with Chesko's fishing mod when steam introduced paid mods.)
Problem 2: dependence. SkyUI became an absolute necessity because practically every must-have mod depended on it. If SkyUI were not free, that wouldn't happen. Those who create free mods aren't going to make their mods depend on a paid mod. And those that create paid mods aren't going to artificially inflate the price of their mods by forcing their customers to pay for another mod. And this is a serious disadvantage for paid mods. If Sam's Super Awesome Mod depends on SkyUI-Generic, then you need to use SUG if want to use SAM. But since SUG is just the free knockoff of SkyUI, it's very likely that they are incompatible. If you use one, you can't use the other.
Now, I could be wrong about the long-term affects of paid modding. I'm just prognosticating. Still, it's certainly not obvious that introducing money is going to make mods significantly better.
At any rate, this is a bit of a detour, since my whole claim was that *I* am not paying for mods. If you think paid mods will result in awesome mods, then that's great, but the quality was never the deterrent.
@RS13: As for spending $.50 on a mod, that would still be a deterrent. I use *hundreds* of mods. And I try out plenty more. Over the course of the life of a game, I could be spending thousands of dollars in microtransactions. Pass.
Of course, it would probably be that very few mods would use the paid mods system... but then in most cases there'd be a free mod that does almost the same thing as the paid version. And by virtue of being free, that mod would become the more used mod and would become the one that other modders would try to ensure compatibility with. So even though there might only be a few mods that I'd want and those were all relatively cheap, I'd still have reason to wait for the version that everyone would be using.
Plus, I don't see any reason why modders would charge so little for their mods. Like the saying goes, if you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.
RS13's comments