Mods have always been a way for fans to create content for their favorite games, and for decades it was seen as a community pursuit, something freeSomething people do for the love of her. But over the past few years, this situation has begun to change.
from Skyrim to grand theft autoAn increasing number of high-profile content creators are beginning to lock their work behind non-paying third-party walls, often on crowdfunding sites like Patreon. This is a thorny issue! On the other hand, if people do work that others enjoy, they deserve to be paid. On the other hand, modding has traditionally been free, and a lot of mods have been created based on a work last Mods – not to mention the work of the game developers themselves – so where can fee-payers draw the line?
There is no clear right or wrong here, which may explain why so many companies have –At least those who haven’t tried to officially bring this stuff into the fold—He was content to let this simmer. One studio that has come out with an opinion, though, is Iron Gate, developers Valheim.
In a statement released yesterday, they said:
Hello Vikings!
Lately we’ve been getting a lot of questions about mods, what we as a company agree with – as well as what we don’t. So we thought we’d try to clear things up a little bit.
First of all, even though we don’t have any official mod support, we’re definitely glad to see that people are taking part in our game and making their own mods for it. It sure is fun that you want to be creative and add your own ideas! Iron Gate does not have any official mod support which basically means that any creation and use of mods is at your own risk, and we cannot guarantee that mods will be compatible with newer versions of the game.
However, the thing we get the most questions from is the phenomenon where mods cost money. We certainly understand that you spend a lot of your time creating mods, and that you might want to be compensated financially for it, but Iron Gate doesn’t condone locking mod content behind a paywall.
We feel that charging money for a mod goes against the creative and open spirit of modding itself, and therefore we urge all mod authors to make their mods freely available to all who wish to play them. This should include the entire mod, not just providing part of the mod for free while another part of it costs money. If you’d like to show your appreciation for a mod author, you can of course still support them with a voluntary donation, but we don’t want payment to be a condition of accessing a mod.
In addition, we would also appreciate it if the mods indicate that they are unofficial mods, either in the game or on any website where the mod is available. Sometimes joining a dedicated mod server will automatically download a mod, and we simply want to avoid confusion for players so they can tell if they are playing a mod or not. Valheim actually has a feature for this, where you can simply trigger a popup in the game, which will let the player know that their game is running with a mod.
Thank you all for taking our wishes into consideration!
Best Regards,
Iron Gate Team
It seems fair! Their compromise, where individual admin works are released for free but generally supported on Patreon, seems the most viable in this situation, not only from a community standpoint but also legally: as Iron Gate says here, a lot of games don’t. Mods are officially supported, and so people diving into someone else’s game code and making money from it certainly seems risky when the money starts changing hands.
As I said, this question will have different answers for each game, depending on how mods are made available and how they are supported, not to mention the opinions of the developers themselves. But in Valheim Case, at least, their position is clear! it’s not link– All they can do is ask the players to take “our wishes into consideration” – but it’s obvious.
