Pretty sure that wasn't p being a dick. Might seem like that when you're the one who made the argument bad enough to de-convert someone, but it's not really how they're coming off.
But also, the effort that goes into bundling lots of small mods together to make a working, coherent mod pack isn't trivial either. Getting lots of mods to play well together in a way that makes sense, and isn't going to break the buyers machine, and now that person is responsible for customer support. Consider that ... it might not be as easy as it sounds to merely slap a pile of small mods together and call it a "pack" that you are now responsible for maintaining.
... well, one of the nicer things about mod efforts -- unofficial stuff not really covered by commercial contract in general, really -- is that responsibility is... very optional. Which is nice. Most of the stuff I've personally done in recent times were blatantly prefaced by, "I'm not going to support this, it's working for me, if it doesn't for you fix it yourself." It's significantly more difficult to do that when dosh is involved, ehehe. Isn't really an argument or anything against paid mods in general*, but it's certainly a reason why you don't want to actually get involved with them, heh.
Though that said, effort involved kludging together mods depends a
lot on the base engine and how mod friendly it is. Sometimes it takes literally illegal reverse engineering, sometimes it takes basically nothing but stuffing a bunch of junk in one folder, or at most smoothing out a few names or whatev'. Modding environments et al can vary pretty drastically.
... all that also said, I
will throw out that something like how ToME is working, I don't really mind. Advance/prototype material behind a paywall, with the promise it will eventually be let loose. Extra bonus being the
code is still visible even without paying, it just doesn't unlock in game without it. That'd be pretty alright, too, some kind of mod support that makes it fairly easy to implement a check like that. One of the larger concerns I have about it all is paywalls blocking off particularly useful/insightful bits of coding or design, particularly from people with the enthusiasm to code but not the means to really pay for it, and something like that assuages that concern rather efectively.
and there's all sorts of situations where someone can afford/has access to a computer and the base material, but no loose funds for anything else, to preempt the whole "If they can afford the game they can afford extra paywall" thing that likes to come out in response to that sort of statement*Already said I'm not
conceptually opposed to them, I think. Modders want to paywall their stuff, if the base game devs give the okay then... okay. It's an incredibly shitty thing to do to all the
other people working on modding, and there's less than zero chance I'd personally pay or otherwise support them, but okay. Just against it practically, since I haven't seen and can't really think of a setup where paywalling mod material would be a net benefit, given how modding works and how symbiotic/self-supporting the process is, at least at its best. Leaving the thing open but asking for donations is great, though. Folks just need to put a bit more effort into hashing out what the right balance between visibility and annoyance is.
