I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to have gone through a lot of "Oh no, this new thing is going to ruin everything!" movements. And yes, there are always changes, but they aren't nearly as devastating or dramatic as predicted. I also spend a lot of time in the writing community, which I see as being fairly parallel to the modding community, in that there ARE a lot of hobbyist writers (currently comparable to mod authors), and there are sites for them, just as there is a large group of unpublished writers wanting to become professionals (currently comparable to the people who are using mods to try to break into game development), and a smaller group of actual professional writers (currently comparable to professional game developers) who not only earn "some money" writing, but actually live on their writing. In the writing community, there is also a LARGE group of writers who have made some money on their writing but not nearly enough to live on. Some professional writers allow up-and-coming writers to take their classes for free and offer a lot for free. There are groups of writers (usually a mix of professional and up-and-coming) who offer critiques to each other for free, while this is normally a paid service (editing) in return for critiques on their work. Some professional writers, on the other hand, charge for classes and/or critiques. I suspect that with the addition of paid mods, you will end up with a similar situation. So, I don't foresee this becoming the doomsday of modding. I think it will actually expand things and entice more people to enter the game, just as the new ease of self-publishing is increasing the number of paid hobbyist writers, people who may have, in the past, simply kept their work to themselves.
