So the Unreal Tournament devs are paying modders to make maps, characters and weapon skins for them...

So the Unreal Tournament devs are paying modders to make maps, characters and weapon skins for them. Is this a good way to do an alternative to "paid mods" by having the company itself pay modders for their work?

Its not the first time they've done this, they had the "Make Something Unreal" contest in UT2k4.

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Unreal Tournament already has paid cosmetics made by users. That's "paid mods" in it as of today.

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There is literally nothing wrong with selling skins in a free game.

The maps are there to download for free from there before they are officially put into the next update.

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Most modders do it to get into the industry. No one will care if you make a shit game, but if you make a decent mod with an established company there is a good chance that company will hire you. Also it is a lot easier to make a map or a skin than an entire game.

Because they have to stop dreaming about enjoying life and creating something, and instead do what it takes to get paid so they can eat food and pay rent.

Those not mods though, quasi-contract work to get shit done.

shit games games can still give you experience needed to make a good game one day , mods on the other hand are more limited that way

It's sorta like having a band , you begin playing covers of songs from other more famous bands and eventually either write your own shit no matter how good or bad that turns out to be , or you just remain a cover band forever

You're a fucking moron.

I'm going to reddit post to explain to your simple minded ass why you're a fucking moron.

A cover band that writes their own shitty songs is a cover band that stays a cover band forever.

No one wants to pay/hear a cover band perform their own music if that music is trash.

Just like how no video game company wants to hire someone that makes shitty games.

"Oh look, this guy can code, draw, compose music and write stories extremely poorly. It must take a lot of work at being average at EVERYTHING."

AAA game companies don't want someone that can do everything poorly. They don't need someone that can program, paint, compose and write. They hire groups of people to take on individual tasks that make up the entire product.

You make a beautiful fucking map. You make one of the best fucking maps ever. They're going to hire you as a fucking map maker. That's what you do, that's what you're good at, that's what you get paid to do.

You make a mediocre game because it's impossible to be great at every single aspect of game design. Congratulations. You just pissed into an ocean of piss. No one gives a shit.

GOD DAMMIT I FUCKING HATE HOW RETARDED YOU ARE. GO HUG YOUR MOTHER RIGHT NOW AND APOLOGIZE FOR BEING SUCH A GIGANTIC PILE OF USELESS CHROMOSOME HOARDING SHIT HEAP.

dafuq?

Ok, so "paid mods" are ok if the game is F2P. Good to know.

The company paying people directly for making content isn't bad.
Having a tf2 style hat system is very different from skyrims paid mod system.

Skyrim mod makers make $0 for way more effort while TF2 hat makers get rich for an hour's work?

the fuck?

That is because they are willingly doing it for free or were kikes and tried making money off of it.
Unlike a mod for skyrim a hat pretty much is just a little cosmetic thing for idiots to spend money on.
Also skyrim is a shit game, I don't know if that supports my argument but they shouldn't be modding a shit game.

I thought the thing about paid mods is that the whole deal of modding is based on making it for fun and not having any compromise in pleasing hypothetical clients. The moment you make modding into a business the whole thing loses its magic of wanting to iterate a product and sharing this iteration just because you want to, selling mods would mean that you are expecting a profitable return and want to beat the competition, that totally changes the mindset from pure creativity to pragmatic strategy, peaking, for example, with selling mods without proper authorization of the creator.

Hats and skins, on the other hand, is something completely different, they never had any intentions of being purely cosmetic additions to the game, otherwise they would be called mods, in valve standards, left 4 dead is a good example of this, you can be mod the fuck out of it until is unrecognizable and still don't pay a cent. Hats and skins were made with micro-transactions market in mind, maybe the real news is that you have users producing this kind of content (Freemiums are quite old, but skins were always made by the devs to my knowledge), but that shouldn't be confused with modding.

Now going back to the topic of the thread, I really don't see a problem with Epic paying the modders for their content, it looks more like a form of donation than "selling", the authors are creating their material despite any expectations of profit, this maintains the spirit of "I make this because I can".

They did something like this with the "Make Something Unreal" competitions in the past and that turned out some decent shit. This seems like a step away, considering that created some higher expectations.

Sounds like Epic are too fucking lazy to work on their own game

As long as they're paying for the work instead of expecting their userbase to pay for it should be fine. It's no different to outsourcing really.

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It's a free game, what the fuck do you expect?

The DLC meme exists because of shit like on-disc DLC where you buy a code to unlock something on the disc you already have

As long as the mods are good and not half-assed because the modders want money, I'm ok with it.

Batrankus in particular has already become one of my favorite UT maps and its likely better than anything the AAA industry has shat out in the last decade.

He's right though.
DLC is bad if you're paying to win or, as the other guy said, paying to unlock the full version of a game you already purchased.
Paying to look fabulous is the most honest form of DLC.


If the people that made the mods are cool with that and just want to help the devs of their favourite free game make money then it's fine. If they are just taking other people's mods and trying to monetize them then they are fags.