New chapter in paid for mods

http://www.pcgamer.com/black-mesa-released-to-steam-early-access/

Is this the new chapter in paid for access for modding? This is slightly different to the recent modding furore over Skyrim. Although HL2 is an older game with some already pretty well established and decent mods, Black Mesa, a total conversion for half life the original in HL2s source engine, is being released for £15 on steam early access.

The original mod was free. But, it was incomplete, with the xen chapter absent in the initial release. What are people's thoughts? A terrible thing? A good thing? The right price? It might be worth pointing out that it is early access (no obligation for them to finish the game?), and the price will rise once released.

I think this is a good thing for paid mods. Black Mesa took forever to come out, due in large part to it being so ambitious. Being allowed to charge for it has probably added a layer of motivation for the developers. And I think it has been widely considered to be a real triumph of the modding community. So kudos to them and good luck I say.

It should also be pointed out that this is not especially new news. They released on their website over 6 months ago that valve had agreed to them selling their work. I wonder whether the split is 75 valve 25 to the modders.

I could see some skyrim mods like Falskaar taking a similar sort of route to this. But as I have said previously, I think paid for mods should be the exception and not the norm. And black Mesa is certainly good enough to be an exception.

$20 is kind of like 4 times too much.

Maniacal said:

$20 is kind of like 4 times too much.

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Well, it is basically a full game. It has its own professionally composed soundtrack, its own voice acting, and the whole thing was built from the ground up and involve a lot of people. I suppose in that sense it is not exactly a mod. You could argue it’s a game in its own right that uses the source engine as the whole thing was built from scratch. Its just all the levels and stuff are based upon those in Half life. A mod is only a mod if it adapts an existing game. Whereas this doesn’t. It exists separately from that game and just borrows the engine from a new game.

Yeah, this is like a remake. It'd be like going to the theatre to see the new Star Trek remake and paying full price, except $20 is pretty good for a game of this scope..

I think? If there is as much gameplay as in the original HL and it takes as long to play through, then the $20 seems like a decent deal.. but then again, wouldn't the story be very similar? A lot of my enjoyment that I get out of gaming comes from solving puzzles and discovering new things. Maybe that's just me though?

This is slightly different to the recent modding furore over Skyrim.

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Extremely different. Black Mesa is pretty much its own game. Can argue price point, but I wouldn't compare it to Skyrim.

This is as much a mod as you would call counter strike a half life mod at this point. I think it's totally fine. There are other games out like this too like a pirates one based off mount and blade's engine.

Yeah I guess there are so many people involved that anything less than $20 could be pushing it. I think that, overall, this is a good move. Hopefully we can get more remakes of games made then! There are many games that seriously need a remake, but developers can't do it themselves and often have little to nobody left who originally worked on it and can't be trusted to do it right.

I do think though that Valve should take note to see where exactly the community is in this regard. So that should mean:

- People do not object to paying for modifications or for optimisations of existing games.
- BUT – they are much more willing to accept it if it is released in a full or part state (for free) before being able to charge for the end bit.

I sincerely believe the way to go for this is to adopt the shareware approach. Which is basically what Black Mesa has actually done – release half of their “mod” and then charge for the full title. We can cross the “pay for different skins” item later. But for mods like Falskaar and Long War, I could quite clearly see a path for them to adopt. Whether that’s in a staged beta mode (Long War) – whereby you pay for the version beyond a certain beta with the ones before remaining free and the ones after also being free (once you have paid that is). Or through releasing part of something and then completing and updating from there. You could do this with Falskaar, it would just take a bit of forward planning on the part of modders if they intended to sell in the future (like only populating half of the new gaming world or dungeons so people could at least see what it was all about).

This was also the problem in introducing paid for mods on an established game. It did not give modders time to plan for the eventual sale of their mods. For the consumer it basically meant and looked like that what was once free you now have to pay for (which is why It went down so badly). This is a dishonest business practice because you weren’t being up front from the start. Whereas if you set your stall out to basically say that you will be charging for this in the future, which is why you are only releasing part of it, then people would be much more receptive to that.

I could then see a system in the future where mods can compete with each other and bundle other mods like skins for weapons etc as part of the package, with the skinner taking a small cut from the overall sales figures. This could also work for UI upgrades and the like. With the proviso that there should be no exclusivity deals (If SkyUI or SKSE became exclusive to a specific mod you could se ethe problem here, although I guess that would basically open up another market so might not be too devastating).

It's more a HD remake than a mod and the price is pretty reasonable. I would also be willing to pay twenty bucks for Skywind should they decide to make it a standalone product.