if u want $$$ for your mod go make a whole game and u will get it!!!!!!!!!! rf is a community based game and know 1 i believe should be able to make $$ from there mods. and i for 1 wont be buying mods, ISI SHOULD BE THE ONLY PPL TO MAKE MONEY OFF THERE GAMES.
If modders made a little money for their efforts, the whole sim community would grow as a whole....... along with better content.... in my opinion....... the people making the "killer" content would take the "extra" money they make over the "not so good" modders and be able to focus on making "even better" content for the community. There will always be modders doing this for purely the love of it....but in the real world ....nowadays if you want to make a COMPLETE from scratch mod w/ tracks, animations, AI, loading screens, Website, forums, download management, etc.... you need to focus major time into it. Which costs $$$$. i dont think the people modding will run away from sim racing with your money.... in the long run, i think your money would return to make it even better... $0.02
And what determines what is good and what is not? Some popular mods are a piece of crap in terms of physics.
time is money , if your going to charge for mods , give us a 30 min trial and if you like it buy it , i tryed to learn 3d max by myself and gave up after a week , just did not want to spend the time with it , for you guys that do make mods thank you ! i have no problem spending 4 or 5 bucks for a good mod , even more if its a must have mod , i fix computers for pep for 10 yrs now and never charge em , after they see the work i do there back here trying to give me all kinds of cash , ill take enough to buy the family pizza , it keeps people happy , thats what life should be about
I think most modders would be happy if they could just pay their server bills with some donations. But as you can see at least 50% of the community gives a damn about modding teams. They take free mods for granted and don't care how much a modder spends in creating a mod that those people play over and over again. In the end you end up with people like Domi that call them piece of crap in terms of physics. It's not like the data for a Formula 1 car is available for free on the internet. If you wan't to create some sort of realistic physics you'll have to spend a lot of time and money during research. So you may end up buying books and magazines for a few houndred EUR and still the WHOLE community isn't able to donate like 5 EUR a month that help a modder paying his server bills. I think almost all modders do this because they've fun doing this. But it wouldn't hurt to show them some support which at least helps them lower their expenses a bit.
What did we all pay for Ferrari Virtual Academy? Quite a bit for what was effectively a netKar Pro mod. It was fun, but I've put less time into that than I have some of the rFactor mods. I would pay for mods, but it would need to be regulated. If the quality was maintained, and the price was sensible (think App Store style, $2-$5), it could work. However as many people have mentioned, copyright will quickly come into effect when money is being made off this stuff, so I don't think it could really progress beyond the 'donation' method. I wouldn't hesitate to buy an offical expansion pack type thing, with multiple cars/tracks etc, where licensing has been sorted and quality equivalent to the original game.
I would definitely pay some money for a good mod, I am actually a bit surprised that there is so many good stuff for free. People should get paid for their job especially good job so yes, I can pay.
and that would result in a drastic reduction of people using mods. me for example, i dont have the possibility of buying mods and like me im sure there are plenty of people that cant spend money in games every month or so. but the modders DO deserve they're praise as they do a great job and for free!
Modders CAN'T charge for mods. Copyright holders would certainly riot and sue the modders. So nobody will ever have to pay for a Formula One mod. But the community could support the modders through donations. I don't know how many users the rFactor community has but if it would be only a few thousand and every person would donate one dollar I'm pretty sure every modding team out there could pay their server bills for some years. So everyone should give it some thought: there is the minority that spends a lot of money and time in giving the majority free mods which they spend hours and hours of playing and still the majority can't even donate a few dollars to the creators of the mod they had so much fun with?
Oblivion try this and fail at charge $$ for mod (dlc) other modders just release it free on there remake version so any that charge $$ for there mod it will be taken from you and released free donations r good
I don't believe there should be an expectation from the community that all mods should be developed and then given away without compensation by the developers. It is the developer's choice how they want their work distributed to the community. If they choose to place a fee on access to their work the market will determine how succesful they are in that effort -- charging will also raise the expectation level from the users and open the developer to far more criticism for things that aren't 'right' in the eyes of the users. It is no differnt than saying all cars should be $10000 regardless of what it takes to create them. If users can't aford the price of the mod that is just the way an open market works. I cannot afford a Ferrari but they have every right to charge what they feel the car is worth. The same should hold true with mods. In the end it is just another product.
Transparent funding of some mods could take modding to a higher level, paying measuring or scanning tools or even permissions to measure or scan certain cars and tracks. But somebody who creates some fantasy physics and want to get paid for that just shouldn't mod sims. Charging money won't make any of those mods better, in contrary it would just motivate the modder to develop his skills to deliver more average quality stuff in less time. Mass instead of class, not my cup of tea...
It's interesting that this discussion coincides with the budget discussions as CTDP. We wrote a blog post about our regular expenses for modding to give you a feeling how we as modders use money and where donations benefit the process and thereby the quality of our work.
Any discussion is good I think, with your discussions of this subject I got inspiration of building actual website for my modding and also flattr account, I must thank you from that My costs are of course not very high, it is so small that I have here, but that depends a bit how do you calculate things. Bought one car to record sounds from it, bought microphone to be able to do enough good recordings, also have bought some parts to get good measurements and took some apart to measure stuff, spending a lot of hours to these subjects. Surely those investments add to another hobby too, so can't put them all to modding account, but modding had big percentage when making decisions to buy all that. For webhosting, I don't pay much, website that I am currently just building is free one from Weebly (http://www.weebly.com/link/YLIiaZ if you register with this link you get 1 month pro account for free so do I), sure it has limitations, but can't do better with current finances, file hosting is 50GB / unlimited bandwidth and 60 euros a year, again I'm bit lucky there, but with 3d models and textures I am considering bought service at the moment, it would put a lot of costs again. I did set up flattr just out of curiosity, if I can get even 5 euros it would cover my hosting for one month, I would be really happy for year at least, so who knows, time will show, maybe I even get Volvo mod ready before rF3 arrives Trouble with estimating costs is bit of such that I have never really kept any book about them, I have bought magazines, manuals, software etc, but really never put them down. I did bought even 3ds Max 7 for Volvo mod, but even I know how to use it by now, I can't make it right, my brain is not compatible or something, still very useful tool for me, but you know how much stand alone licenses of max cost. Factory workshop manuals I luckily got free as I have got many things, but I have worked with mod since 2006 and it is still WIP. In these six years I would guess total costs are somewhere around 4000 euros, much more if putting full share of investments for modding account, so it is over 660 euros per year. That is what I have paid so that there is current WIP version of Volvo 300 mod. Then there is amount of my time, I could sell my skills on various areas and make income, let's say that I would work really really cheap and I would get 5 euros per hour after taxes. My estimate is that I have worked around 1.5 years with average of 10 hours of day, I tend to work around the clock when I get into working, that would be 5475 hours of labour, multiply that with 5 euros per hour and I could have been making 27 375 euros of money if I would been working instead of modding. So, in total I have invested over 30 000 euros for single mod alone and that is just my own time and work. When someone says that he would not pay single dime from mods, I would like that person to understand how much he actually gets for free, perfectly from free will of someone else doing what he likes. If 1000 players would like to cover all the costs it would be over 300 euros per each player, that much it has cost to me and to make profit I would need to ask more. Well sure, lot of there has been learning and still is, if I would know everything it would not take so long to make a mod, but it is still huge work and when we start counting time too it suddenly becomes clear that nobody is going to make any profit out from modding, not if he puts any price to his own time that is. I think that wraps money subject quite well and also why somebody think about paying from mod would be ok. I can make mod under 24 hours, from scratch, you have the proof that is my Kantti mod, but I doubt any single individual could do a good mod from scratch with accurate and realistic physics in less than 6 months and that would be just a single car at best, also it would require all freetime put into modding and ton of cash for fastly acquire resources. That is something also everyone should understand. If one has any extra coins to spend, I would say that support mods that you enjoy, it is not turning modding to be profit hunting, some may try that, but it is never going to even cover all the costs, so mods will be free probably forever.
Make them free to download and have a donate function would work best i think. Or make them extremely cheap. Problem i see with the paying model is exactly the same issue as Xbox live's indie games. Theres some real gems, but you don't half have to wade through some crap. And If you have to pay for the crap, the real modders will loose out because people will be turned off. Obviously certain teams and modders are well known, but theres other great tracks out there which arn't prehaps up to the same graphical standards, but have good flow or are just interesting and these guys deserve a donation too. Rfactor central has its rating system, but thats potentially subject to abuse. That said, there is a risk that buy putting a price on a mod, your giving it value and by doing that you risk modders getting turned off by low incomes for decent work. As it is right now, they gets lots of thanks. Its debatable that you'd get more satisfaction from just those words then peoples cash. But i'm not a mod so can't actually vouch for that theory.
I wouldn't mind paying for somebody's hard work. I am a seasoned Flightsimmer too and I have bought many add-ons.
