mouser9169

Haven't posted here much, and coming a bit late to this party, but here's my take: This is a great time to be an indie game developer. Unreal, Crysis, Unity, RPG Maker are all easily licensed for commercial games, and there are some solid titles out there from all of them. I started work on one project, got it to a workable demo stage, and had to shelve it because I don't have the time and resources to make it a solid commercial entity, but I'm not going to put in a couple years work for no return. What this does is gives an avenue for talented people who wouldn't mod before to go ahead and make some good stuff for these games (if it works for Skyrim, others will follow). Modders that have been happy to release free stuff in the past will probably continue to do so. Those with some superb mods that they poured massive amounts of time into may decide they want some return on their investment. Remember: you don't have a "right" to get free mods from the community. That's the mod author's decision. It always has been, though they've been limited between release for free and not release at all (and go build on something they can monetize) in the past. I don't see free modding going away. I do see some new talent coming in, and the bar being raised on what quality mods are like. That will in turn push quality standards on the free mods as well. This is a happy day for modding - in the long run, everybody wins. The community gets better mods, more variety, and the game devs get money to keep making games - with a strong incentive to make the games easily moddable (Mass Effect, I'm looking at you...)