Steam opens up paid mods for Skyrim.

Still don't understand why anyone who say, for example, wants to donate $20 outright should have to donate 4 separate times. That seems like an unnecessary hassle. And for what purpose? Doesn't really make any sense to me.

 

Well, I think introducing the idea of a potential upper limit to modders will help their expectations remain tied to reality as far as money goes. It encourages high quality works by modders due to making their best chance at a positive cash flow lie in mods that many would want to use and donate to once or more instead of thinking that windfalls are going to come in big waves.


...and you have to consider the possibility of money laundering.

 

When I donated to Prema for his BIOS and VBIOS mod, it was more than $5 worth. I wouldn't have bothered to donate more if there was an arbitrary cap in place. I think the way Prema (and other modders in this community) handles their donation schemes are the perfect model for game mods. Pay what you want, when you want. Like the Humble Bundles - that's what I'd like to see for mods.

 

Why not?

 

No need to get defensive. Having a cap just doesn't make much sense. Sure multiple times is an alternate, but why? It would force people who want to donate more than $5 for a quality mod to likely not do so.

 

I'm not defensive, I said it.

P.S.: Ya kinda did it again. [ Link back to #102]

 

Well, you can continue to support that route but I'd say 99.9% of people would prefer an open ended donation. I never see capped donations on anything game or mod related.

I'm not even sure how money laundering would come into play here. Anyone can donate to anyone for any reason using PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, etc.

 

Donating multiple times over is just silly, it takes more time and creates more hassle. I'm not going through the payment process multiple times over for no apparent reason. I prefer to make payments all in one go, rather than by piecemeal. I always pay for my smartphones outright, for example, rather than paying by contract. I try to avoid ongoing payments wherever possible to simplify my bank account management.

The trick to getting people to pay up is to make it as convenient and simple as possible. Making it unnecessarily convoluted just adds barriers to people who want to donate more than $5 and makes them less likely to bother.

I see no reason why there shouldn't be an option for an ongoing payment if people wish to do that, but I also can't see why there needs to be a $5 limit on donations in place.

 

Thank god this horrible idea was junked... It was a disaster waiting to happen.. Can't even believe the fact that they put so many restrictions on the how much the mod had to be sold to get any money and not to mention the massive majority cut Steam and Bethesda took....