Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods Mods for sale, with official support ?

TF2 and DotA2 both monetarily compensate content creators for their time and effort, and as a result get a constant stream of high quality submissions. Players that are worth caring about from a business perspective are more than willing to pay a fair price for new content, if a modder or team of modders want to produce this content and charge for it the more power to them.

However, Larian as a company has to provide appropriate support for this, including profit share and methods of resolution for the issues that will certainly arise. If Larian doesn't want to do that, which is understandable because despite it most likely being profitable for them and an encouragement to modding it's a lot of backend work and things that are pulling them away from their core business, then there isn't much choice but to rely on a donation system.

It's nice to see modders getting compensated for their time and effort, and implementing a system that simplifies the process would be great for spurring on larger, more interesting mods which are what people would realistically be likely to spend money on.

Every single extensive modding community I've seen runs into terrible drama issues, a good deal of it stemming from modders getting burned out after spending a ridiculous amount of time creating content for no compensation and having users become toxic. Modders particularly dislike having their content used in other mods without credit, because credit and the warm fuzzy feeling of accolades is the only thing they usually get for their work. This sort of situation where people feel highly possessive of their work, have no means to profit off of it, and have to deal with a super unpleasant userbase makes it a wonder anybody bothers publicly releasing mods at all. It's no surprise a lot of modders eventually have a meltdown and remove all their content from sites, this sort of stuff could drive anybody crazy.

Just the idea of people being compensated for their time and wanting to know if Larian would provide the means for it seems to absurdly upset some people here, which is an early indicator of the same unpleasant elements you'll find in most modding scenes. The tools aren't even in a state to realistically produce an entirely new scenario, but you're somehow killing the community by asking Larian's stance on it.

It's Larian's engine, their tools, their decision on what's acceptable for created content using them. They should definitely have a stance sooner rather than later though so people can decide if the environment is worth their time.