Monetizing mods

The user can add an adf.ly link to the description of the mod, so that way both options are available :slight_smile:

Thatā€™s the way that we do it on my site, works for everybody as long as they also make the item available without the adf.ly link

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This seems like a reasonable compromise. Clicking on an AdFly link at least shows you might want to offer a little support to the mod developer but if you think it is too sleezy to even go that route, a direct link is available.

I do wish there was an alternative site which didnā€™t have so deceptive ads, and likely things which applied more directly to Stonehearth players, but that would take a whole lot of work to make. There was an effort to do something like that for Minecraft that used Google ads when custom ads werenā€™t being applied, but then Google pulled the rug out from under them as their page views (in the 1000ā€™s per day) were deemed too low for Google to bother with.

We all want to make some extra $$ butā€¦
I donā€™t think itā€™s right to profit from Radiant hard work. The only reason we will be able to make mods for this game is because they build it that way. Just be grateful for that.

Apart from some Paypal donations the only acceptable monetization I can think of would be for Radiant to select a mod themselves and make an undisclosed offline payment to the author if and when they see fit.

yeah, but that can get a bit dicey, as making payments to third parties opens up a host of potential problemsā€¦

radiant just has to provide a clear definition of what they see as acceptable, and we as a community have to respect that decision, whatever it may beā€¦ personally, when iā€™ve been a part of large mod projects, iā€™ve never once gone into it with aspiratins or profiting from itā€¦ its always been first and foremost about having fun with the toolsā€¦

weā€™re playing with giant digital lego sets here people! :smile:

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I want to note here that if you are creating a mod, anybody using the mod will at the very least need to buy a copy of Stonehearth. Radiant is going to be getting money from mod development regardless of how ever else the mod is distributed as well as how ever much the mod developer can extract from a will group of potential mod buyers. It is also possible that mod development could be seen as an extra source of income for Radiant, so I wouldnā€™t really cry too hard for Radiant and they can certainly get a cut of any money in any fashion from the mod development.

Furthermore, mods add value to the game itself. I seriously doubt that Minecraft would be nearly as popular as it is nor would there be nearly as many YouTube videos about the game if it wasnā€™t for mods. All of that is free advertising and a huge draw. Stonehearth might even be much more successful as creating mods for Stonehearth is going to be much, much easier and will be supported with standardized API right from the beginning.

As I was pointing out at the top of this thread, there will be a great many people making a profit off of the modsā€¦ it just wonā€™t be the mod developers directly. Curse is going to be one of those companies if there is at the bare minimum a page on the wiki devoted to a description of the mod and how it is used (from the banner ads alone). There will be others including YouTube reviewers as well as people who will be running servers that will require payment of some kind in order to operate those servers. Do you really think it is fair for all of those other people making money off of the mod developers (all people who are not Radiant as well I might add but instead 3rd parties who had nothing to do with either developing the game nor the mod), but the mod developers themselves canā€™t make any money?

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Totally agree with ya man.

Iā€™ve always been a fan of the donate buttons personally. If the mod is good and it is clear time has been put into it perhaps when you download it it will send you to the creators website which has a donate button. also from in game itā€™ll say you have X mod installed with a button to their website so you can go and donate at a later stage.
forcing people to pay for mods in my eyes is wrong as we will see people paying Ā£5/$5 just for a shiny shield by accident or something. I do believe some should be rewarded but iā€™d probably stick away from them unless I know it would add a decent chunk of content. Even then Iā€™d prefer to donate after trying it out.

The problem with ā€œdonate to meā€ buttons is that seldom are they actually usedā€¦ at least for mod developers that Iā€™ve seen for other games. It is a nice sentiment and perhaps gives you some warm fuzzies to see that the button is there, but it really doesnā€™t work. Even very popular mods tend to get a dozen bucks or so of cash from a donation button at most, and depending on how those donations are being collected it may be possible to have that swallowed up in transaction fees.

Iā€™m not against a software developer wanting to offer such a donation button, and I do think that you could set up some way to encourage donations to happen such as how the Kickstarter campaign by Radiant has obviously used donations to help fund their project and could be used as a model for mod development as well. Public television stations in America use the same model for funding (and do things very much like Kickstarter with ā€œrewardsā€ and other premiums for various funding levels). That does take some effort and is not merely a ā€œdonate to meā€ button either though.

If Radiant wants to force mod developers into making all of their mods available under a free software license, Iā€™m even fine with thatā€¦ as long as it is spelled out. I personally donā€™t mind if somebody who is going to be putting in hundreds or even thousands of hours of effort into developing a quality mod might want to keep that effort only to paying customers, but that is a developer decision to me. Would you be fine if a mod developer had content that was exclusive to just people who helped pay a certain funding level in a Kickstarter project for mod development? Perhaps not the whole mod, but parts of it?

@KingKorihor I think that if you are making mods to make money off them, you are going to be frustrated because unless you find a way to load the mod with DRM (killing the whole DRM-free spirit of Stonehearth), you are going to suffer piracy and copyright infringement that will make it hardly worth the trouble to create the mod.

What it sounds like, though, is that you are not so much pushing one specific model as you are asking Radiant to publish some official word on the matter. That is something only @Tom or @Ponder could give you.

You donā€™t need to introduce the straw man argument of DRM into this discussion. Radiant is admittedly going to be making Stonehearth DRM-free (as you have pointed out), and many other software developers have been very successful with commercial software distribution and not bothering with that whole can of worms. If somebody is being a scumbag and distributing a mod via bittorrent and even being brazen with their own website to distribute a popular modā€¦ it is no different than others doing to same for other software packages. The choice to use DRM is a completely separate issue to monetization or if it will be allowed in the first place. I certainly would think somebody doing a bit torrent of Stonehearth to be a scumbagā€¦ and I hope that the mod community especially discourages any support for ā€œcrackedā€ or less than legitimate copies of Stonehearth purchased or obtained through illegitimate channels.

Even if Radiant decides to require free distribution for mods, that doesnā€™t dismiss copyright issues on mods either. If you copy a mod and arguably even a mod concept and implement it in another mod, there may be some copyright issues to contend with. I even dumped on somebody who was producing a ā€œLion Kingā€ mod for Minecraftā€¦ and noted that was a copyright violation (by copying the characters from the Walt Disney title) and even noted the e-mail address to contact the IP attorneys for the Disney corporation if they didnā€™t believe me. Strangely, that post also was culled from the MC forums, but I digress. My point here is that copyright issues still remain regardless of the payment model (or lack thereof) and are something that perhaps mod developers should be a bit schooled in as well.

I am also not discouraging those mod developers who donā€™t care about payment. If you want to made a mod and give it away to the world, I not only will thank you but will shout praises to you as well. Not everybody will feel like doing that and may want to get some money or may want to put in some license restrictions (like the GPL or CC-by-SA) that others may hate. Mind you, there are many people who hate the GPL thinking it is too restrictive of a software license and will insist everything is put into the public domain. All I am asking here is both feedback (hopefully) from Radiant as well as the general Stonehearth community as well in terms of what they think of monetizing mods.

Iā€™ll also note that I explicitly asked about this topic on the livestream and it was voted down and culled from the discussion before it could get to them. I suppose this forum thread is the only hope left to get an answer. I could ask directly as well (and may still go that route), but getting feedback from many in the community is a good thing to at least show where many of the more vocal members of this community lie in the continuum of ā€œno monetization over my dead bodyā€ to ā€œget everything the market can bearā€. There are a few people suggesting there might even be some sentiment in between, and Iā€™ll also note that Radiant seems to be interested in making a profitable businessā€¦ so they might be a little more sympathetic to mod developers interested in making a buck off of their creations as well. Time will tell.

I do think it is useful to have this discussion before mods are created on a large scale, so we can discuss these issues a little more dispassionately instead of people bitching about how their source of revenue is now being cut off because so and so was a jerkā€¦ or the other way around where some people will be pissed because the mod theyā€™ve been using is now asking them for money for an update.

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Not to minimize any effort that anyone has and will put into modding, but, as has been stated, a mod is generally made when someone wants to see something in the game and does it on their own. While Iā€™m not saying they donā€™t deserve to make money, it makes more sense to use a) the Donation button, b) the ā€œPay What You Wantā€ method or c) Ad hosting of some sort to make money, rather than outright charging, especially when youā€™re basically feeding off of someone elseā€™s hard work (in this case, RadEnt).

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Thatā€™s not a fair statement to make. You make it sound like every modder is just lazy and canā€™t come up with their own work. Thatā€™s not true. Modding is not simple or easy. It take a lot of time and effort to make a really good mod work and function well. It usually take more than one person and a lot of reprogramming and add in features that the original game never had.

There are many examples of Mods outliving the original games that they are made from. For example, Counter Strike and DOTA are two mods that have gone on longer than the games that they were made from. They have a huge following and fans. So, to just say that someone is a leach or a parasite feeding off of someone elseā€™s hard work. Is completely unfair and not true.

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that is exactly what I have always thought about modders, they just do it for the challenge and just to have fun

You could say the same thing about most game developers in general. There are a great many motivations behind mod developers. You are also trivializing how much effort it takes to develop some mods, which are going to be so significant that in some cases it may be a completely different game. Just look at Tobiasā€™ Norse expansion: This is such a top to bottom overhaul of the game that it will take on a life all to itself.

There is also the problem of mod maintenance. A mod developer might create a really cool mod, but it eventually does turn into a chore trying to keep it current and making sure the mod is compatible and blends in well with the current version of the game. This is more than simply making sure the mod will load into the game, but that the content is appropriate as well and that new content added into the base game isnā€™t conflicting with the mod. I am suggesting that a mod developer getting a little bit of money on the side might be an added motivation for them to keep the mod current, to fix bugs, and to do the work that is often a thankless task which goes well beyond the intellectual challenge of figuring out how to make a mod.

I have seen far too many mods where that challenge of creating a mod has been more than satisfied but it is still so buggy as to be unplayable and certainly conflicts with other mods.

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Yeah, I realize that thatā€™s not exactly the proper way to state it, and understand the points youā€™re trying to make. And thats the thing with the modding is how do we approach certain issues. For example, what if you make and attempt to monetize a wolf mod, and someone else decides to make a mod that contains wolves as well? Its a lot clearer with total conversion mods, such as DOTA and Counter Strike. And I think thats going to be an issue that will pretty much sort itself out. If youā€™re charging for a mod that contains parts that can be found elsewhere, which WILL happen with basic things, people arenā€™t going to support you.

tl;dr Itā€™s up to the modder if he/she charges or not. However, there WILL be mods that do the same or a similar thing, so in the end itā€™ll be sorted out by simple supply and demand.

that pretty much sums it up, i would sayā€¦ if modders have the option to charge/ask for donations, etc., then at the end of the day, if they have created something that folks find worthy of their hard earned scratchā€¦ well, thenā€¦ capitalism has prevailedā€¦ :wink:

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This thread has turned into the most philosophical on the forums, Iā€™d bet. Anyhow, my final list of words follows:

  • Radient will probably have a repository.
  • If you put DRM in your mod, or add DRM to the game (a la Forge Mod Loader), peeps will hate you.
  • Making money should never be a motivator. Benefit, through ads, donate buttons, etc, maybe. But never the goal.
  • Legal rights will most likely be addressed by Radiant, and ideally will be uniform and enforced. No mod owner should ever be in a position where he feels the need, or has the right, to sue another mod maker. Thatā€™s divisive and stupid.
  • Make Mods because of the challenge and reward of seeing your things in game. Not the profit. ā† Most important!

Thatā€™s pretty much it. King Korihor, not regulating and centralizing leads to problems long term, period. Examples:

  1. 9minecraft.net
  2. minecraftdl.com
  3. minecraft-mods.org
  4. skydaz.com
  5. minecraftmine.org
  6. minecraft9.altervista.org

All of these are sites that harvest, rehost, re-adfly, and redistribute mods without permission. They slather their websites with ads, use SEO tricks to get to the top of google, misrepresent mod versions (causing numerous problems) and generally couldnā€™t give a shit less about copyright. The internet in general, in unregulated markets of derivative works such as mods, does not care about copyright. Thaumcraft has tried for months to get mod-packs behind ad.fly links to stop using his mod, and only some have complied. (Some of the bigger names tried to comply in the first place.)

The gist is, you can talk about the law as much as you like (you sound well-versed) but the internet is a brutal, chaotic space where quite frankly, US copyright law holds about as much nectar as a sieve. To use your own example:

Login - Minecraft Forum

Up to date and everything. Just saying.

Trying to control copyright will lead to animosity. Removing the ability for leeches to SEO their way into riches is firmly completed with a central repository. It centralizes policing of mods, to prevent direct clones, police copyright violations of third-party products if they choose, and it allows Radiant to completely manage and regulate monetization, whether they choose download ads, donate buttons, paywalls, that will be up to them, and itā€™s honestly kind of useless to speculate on at this stage.

Edit: :confused: So many errors. I must type less hastily.

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In my experience with user-created-content is that there are usually a lot of people who like to create stuff simply for the fun of it. Being able to post it to the digital community is a plus, and if you add some kind of rating system with perks Iā€™m sure youā€™ll have more content than youā€™ll know what to do with. Perfect examples are the games ā€œSporeā€ and ā€œLittle Big Planetā€. They allowed people to share their creations and they now offer many millions of objects and levels created by the users. I donā€™t think monetary compensation is necessary. If anything, the really good Mod creators will use their creations as a sort of Portfolio to get better pay on other jobs outside the game.

Another thought just crossed my mind about this.

In itself a mod might only have small changes or as seen in some games quite some huge changes.
But given how very flexible Stonehearth will probably be we might see some total conversion mods.

The thought is, why should these mods be released as mods?
If its a total and complete conversion, maybe it would be a better idea to license the ā€œStonehearth-Engineā€ from Radiant and release the own game really as standalone game, paying some royalties per sold copy to Radiant.
This would grant all the perks and pitfalls of being an independent company to the people making the ā€œmodā€.

So the best way to monetize a mod would maybe be not to publish it as mod. Hmā€¦

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