a discussion on KSP, Mods and making money

[BmB]

Monetization made everything ****ty over at Minecraft. Don't make the same mistake.

A mod is and should be a labour of love. If you attract people to your game with money, you're attracting the wrong crowd.

[Navy4422]

IMO I'm fine with a donate button to be able support some of my favorite mods

[N3X15]

Donations are fine, guys. Addons are just pieces of code the game runs in place of stock parts or part modules. If we had a problem with them, we wouldn't have added the addon loader in the first place.

[Andorian Blues]

Donation buttons seem fine to me, just as long as people don't start using those gross redirect sites that force you to look at advertisements before you can download their mod so they can get a couple cents from the ad revenue. That's incredibly common with Minecraft mods and I have no idea why their forum moderators allow it.

[Menecroth]

I'm certainly not going to ask for money for making mods, but if someone wanted to send me some, I wouldn't exactly complain. Of course, the only thing I've done so far is a mod with a whopping two parts...

[NavyFish]

On 9/6/2012 at 0:57 PM, jonathan_92 said:

My understanding is that Nova Silisko was originally a modder. Is that correct? Perhaps if Squad gave the incintive of adding certain mods to future vanilla versions of the game, and possibly paying the modders for their work, that might stimulate a lot of very high quality works. You could very well expand your team pretty easily this way. As an indie game fan, I love the idea of a game created by a massive community of modders. I have friends that are actually looking for 3D modelling work/internships, and who would probably love to put this game on their resumes'. Just a thought

I know this is an ancient thread but I enjoyed rhe discussion and wanted to chip in my $0.02.

The perpetuity of KSP is in large part due to the continued development support it receives. Primarily that development support comes from the squad, however given the large number of high quality plugins available to this community I feel it is easy to say that mods contribute a significant value to many players continued experience of the game.

Squad is spending a long time working on this game, and have been growing an increasing community size. But the number of active players declines over time without continuous new input. Mods provide the majority of that shorter-term novel content, to bridge the gap between squad's larger patches (which have been entirely free thus far).

 

If I were in Squad's position, I would shift to a DLC-oriented business model, releasing content packs and gameplay updates over the period of once every 2-4 months and charging a considerably small fee of $1-2 per patch.

Additionally, I would fuel the modding community to continue to provide smaller, 'higher-frequency' content updates with monetary-based (and perhaps eventual 'promotion-based') incentive programs.  

The end product, I feel, would be a continuously growing organism that *is* KSP. One Kerbol system would grow into many, and an intergalactic, multiplayer KSP experience may emerge.

Your shot, Squad.

 

-Navy

[minepagan]

1 hour ago, NavyFish said:

I know this is an ancient thread but I enjoyed rhe discussion and wanted to chip in my $0.02.

The perpetuity of KSP is in large part due to the continued development support it receives. Primarily that development support comes from the squad, however given the large number of high quality plugins available to this community I feel it is easy to say that mods contribute a significant value to many players continued experience of the game.

Squad is spending a long time working on this game, and have been growing an increasing community size. But the number of active players declines over time without continuous new input. Mods provide the majority of that shorter-term novel content, to bridge the gap between squad's larger patches (which have been entirely free thus far).

 

If I were in Squad's position, I would shift to a DLC-oriented business model, releasing content packs and gameplay updates over the period of once every 2-4 months and charging a considerably small fee of $1-2 per patch.

Additionally, I would fuel the modding community to continue to provide smaller, 'higher-frequency' content updates with monetary-based (and perhaps eventual 'promotion-based') incentive programs.  

The end product, I feel, would be a continuously growing organism that *is* KSP. One Kerbol system would grow into many, and an intergalactic, multiplayer KSP experience may emerge.

Your shot, Squad.

 

-Navy

1. What? Mods provide only short term content? Have you seen, say, RSS? MKS? BDB? Those all at least double the size/scope of the game, and are just individual mods. How about RO or BDA, that completely change the game?

2.DLC oriented. So you want KSP to turn into Advanced Warfare? Microtransactions out the wazooo? No. I shouldn't even have to explain why.

3.Frequent updates just break mods. So no.

4.all "monetary incentives" does is make people steal others' work, scream 'he copied me', ect. and promote people to make mods, then abandon them once they have their money.

5.KSP already is that. All you would be doing is limiting it - mods are infinite, but if they are tied to money or broken by updates it defeats the whole purpose.

 

Tl;dr: No.

[NavyFish]

I'm not sure if you read the same post I wrote, but here goes.

1. I did not say mods provide "only" short-term content, you should re-read that sentence. I did say that they provide the majority of the shorter-term content, i.e. the numerous part expansion packs, contract packs, gameplay tweaks, etc., that breathe fresh air into the KSP base.  There are also mods that provide much larger scopes of content, such as those you mentioned and others like the pre-stock resource system provided by Kethane. What was your point with this statement exactly?

2. I think if Squad is to continue generating revenue from KSP, and thus supporting it with development time, they need to monetize it eventually. And yes, "DLC" - think all of the updates to Europa Universalis as a good example - I feel would be one such option.

3. Frequent updates can affect mod authors, yes. I know, I am one of those authors for a fairly well known mod. A) I think an update cycle of 4 months is quite reasonable, B) updates don't have to change core API - in fact I've only had to change significant parts of my codebase TWICE since version 0.22. C), see part 4.

4. Copyright laws are in place for a reason. The potential for copyright infringement doesn't stop most software developers. Community regulation exists in a free-market.

5. The point I was trying to make, which you seem to have missed or at least chosen not to address, is that mods are integral to the long-term replayability of KSP, and that Squad should recognize that and look for ways to encourage mod writers to spend their time generating content for KSP. Sure, some people will always do that 'out of love', but true diversity and quality of product often arises through a competitive marketplace. Check out an app store. 

 

[RaendyLeBeau]

Good discussion - this topic should be deepened in my opinion.

Why: apart from the clear moral aspect that speaks for each modder, and the one donation NOT against copy right, I would address this topic quite differently.
- first :I would hide that it is the game theme, it is about art. To expand the art, to embellish it and to give the end user an emotion.

Spoiler

To achieve this one needs in a variety of areas good to sher good experience, 3-D modeling, GameEngine, artistic-texturing, techn.-mechanical knowledge about basic procedures, programming skills - alike paired with astrophysics, at least astrophysics should have basic knowledge be for KSP.

a mod is the product of many countless working days, which an artist or Artist Team (modding artist's) needs to make available.

- as simple and self-evident as it is today to pay for a good mp3 song few cents on the music portals (like Apple Music, Spotify,etc.), so it should be self-evident also for modding artists
- as simple as the musician from the music-portals, the cents so that he can continue to make good music, so of course this should also be for a modding artist !

So I do not partly understand the whole principle-discussion whether one should donate at all for modding(ARTIST) .. my view is quite clear YES!

YES it should be self-evident - in reality it is not .. consumer think: 'is only a modder'... but the MP3 songs on consumers handy are also free ...?  NO ! no, because musician cant live by air  - .. coffee costs

-> free download mentality harms everyone.  First the artist,. later the consumer .. because the artist has changed job or hobby.

 

 

Edited January 24, 2017 by RaendyLeBeau