Donation Points system now live for mod authors on Nexus Mods

[dikr]

In response to post #60450772.

CaedesAposis wrote:

So this is how modding finally dies and becomes monetized. With thunderous applause from its last bastion of freedom. Shame really.

"User files: 0"

I shouldn't worry too much about that. Nexus will first and foremost be a free platform; free to download a metric ton of awesome user made content and free to share your own mods with others, that is. The donations come from the platform itself rather than directly from users (which few ever opt to do anyway), that's a notable difference compared to say, Creation Club. If anything, it's an added incentive for people to create and share mods and that's never a bad thing. As most of us modders are used to the fact that we don't earn anything with it and do it for fun and contribution anyhow. Edited May 28, 2018 by dikr

[Deleted23213994User]

In response to post #60434912. #60435157, #60439167 are all replies on the same post.

JinKanzaki wrote: I wonder how many of the people complaining here have spent more than 10 bucks on mod donations in the past 10 years...

endgameaddiction wrote: I don't donate and never will. Modding is a hobby and doesn't require money for compensation. Feedback is perfectly fine.

FLipdeezy wrote: Lol no offense but who made you the authority?

Okay, I'm going outside to the beach and making a sand castle every day. Why? because I like doing it. it's a hobby. If you don't throw cash at me, you are an inconsiderate individual because you can't understand how much effort, hard work and hours I've put into it just so people can look at it.

Pay me. Now.

[Reneer]

Okay, I'm going outside to the beach and making a sand castle every day. Why? because I like doing it. it's a hobby. If you don't throw cash at me, you are an inconsiderate individual because you can't understand how much effort, hard work and hours I've put into it just so people can look at it.

 

Pay me. Now.

That's not a good analogy.

 

A better one, I think, would be an artist making a painting and then selling prints of it for much less than the original painting cost to make.

 

Or, to keep the sandcastle example, you create a mold from one of your sandcastles and sell it, allowing other people to build the same sandcastle as you.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Reneer

[DoctorKaizeld]

 

Okay, I'm going outside to the beach and making a sand castle every day. Why? because I like doing it. it's a hobby. If you don't throw cash at me, you are an inconsiderate individual because you can't understand how much effort, hard work and hours I've put into it just so people can look at it.

 

Pay me. Now.

That's not a good analogy.

 

A better one, I think, would be an artist making a painting and then selling prints of it for much less than the original painting cost to make.

 

Or, to keep the sandcastle example, you create a mold from one of your sandcastles and sell it, allowing other people to build the same sandcastle as you.

 

like what Games Workshop does!... wait no... not what they do...

[steve40]

 

In response to post #60434912. #60435157, #60439167 are all replies on the same post.

 

 

 

JinKanzaki wrote: I wonder how many of the people complaining here have spent more than 10 bucks on mod donations in the past 10 years...

endgameaddiction wrote: I don't donate and never will. Modding is a hobby and doesn't require money for compensation. Feedback is perfectly fine.

FLipdeezy wrote: Lol no offense but who made you the authority?

Okay, I'm going outside to the beach and making a sand castle every day. Why? because I like doing it. it's a hobby. If you don't throw cash at me, you are an inconsiderate individual because you can't understand how much effort, hard work and hours I've put into it just so people can look at it.

 

Pay me. Now.

 

 

Except it's a privately owned beach, that the owner lets people build sand castles on for free. He pays his bills for owning this beach through advertising signs erected at various locations. So the owner, realizing that the castle-builders help to attract more people to the beach, decides to donate some money to the castle makers, based on how many visitors they each attract.

[MPDStudios]

In response to post #60450772. #60469072 is also a reply to the same post.

CaedesAposis wrote:

So this is how modding finally dies and becomes monetized. With thunderous applause from its last bastion of freedom. Shame really.

dikr wrote: "User files: 0"

I shouldn't worry too much about that. Nexus will first and foremost be a free platform; free to download a metric ton of awesome user made content and free to share your own mods with others, that is. The donations come from the platform itself rather than directly from users (which few ever opt to do anyway), that's a notable difference compared to say, Creation Club. If anything, it's an added incentive for people to create and share mods and that's never a bad thing. As most of us modders are used to the fact that we don't earn anything with it and do it for fun and contribution anyhow.

I don't think it's the sort of monetization you're envisioning at the moment. Modders are not selling their mods, nor are they selling it to a distributor, i.e. giving the rights to their content to Nexus to sell as they like, but are being given a certain amount of money based on the popularity of their creations, which is a direct contributor to the popularity of the site.
I'm open to suggestion here, but I don't see how this limits freedom in terms of what can be popularized, uploaded, or created. Sure, it encourages creators to make larger, more refined mods/content in order to meet the requirements of the Donation Points system and generate some revenue, as big mods really don't make much off donations anyway, but it doesn't make small creations, niche mods, or simple fixes less important/harder to upload. It doesn't change the uploading/hosting system of Nexus at all, in reality.

So think of it less as Creation Club, in which users sell their mods, and more of say, youtube's monetization system, in which creators are paid by the site to have popular content.

[MPDStudios]

In response to post #60434912. #60435157, #60439167, #60487932 are all replies on the same post.

JinKanzaki wrote: I wonder how many of the people complaining here have spent more than 10 bucks on mod donations in the past 10 years...

endgameaddiction wrote: I don't donate and never will. Modding is a hobby and doesn't require money for compensation. Feedback is perfectly fine.

FLipdeezy wrote: Lol no offense but who made you the authority?

endgameaddiction wrote: Okay, I'm going outside to the beach and making a sand castle every day. Why? because I like doing it. it's a hobby. If you don't throw cash at me, you are an inconsiderate individual because you can't understand how much effort, hard work and hours I've put into it just so people can look at it.

Pay me. Now.

Ikr Edited May 29, 2018 by MPDStudios

[Vanguardascendant]

 

 

Okay, I'm going outside to the beach and making a sand castle every day. Why? because I like doing it. it's a hobby. If you don't throw cash at me, you are an inconsiderate individual because you can't understand how much effort, hard work and hours I've put into it just so people can look at it.

 

Pay me. Now.

That's not a good analogy.

 

A better one, I think, would be an artist making a painting and then selling prints of it for much less than the original painting cost to make.

 

Or, to keep the sandcastle example, you create a mold from one of your sandcastles and sell it, allowing other people to build the same sandcastle as you.

 

like what Games Workshop does!... wait no... not what they do...

 

 

I smell heresy.

[andyjs]

In response to post #60377462. #60378147, #60380477, #60382372, #60393797, #60402592, #60413157 are all replies on the same post.

andyjs wrote: I love the idea in principle, especially as I'm not in a position to donate directly myself. Ideally I'd like to see a modder's helpfulness and willingness to engage with users rewarded as well, but I realise that's almost impossible to measure objectively and you've got enough to be doing.

Off the top of my head though I can see an issue that could be fixed, or at least accounted for (apologies if already addressed).

Doesn't it skew unfairly towards makers of mods for the most popular games? As an example, the most downloaded Companion mod (comparing the same category to be more equitable) for Morrowind (comparatively high on the list of supported games at no.9) has had about 1,500 unique dls. The one for Oblivion (no.5) has had nearly 38,000. For Skyrim (no.1) over ten times that, at around 388,000 uniques. Even though the payout is based on downloads in the last 30 days, those numbers are going to skew similarly I think; probably even more so. That was a flawed example because doesn't take into account how long those mods have been available, but gives a rough idea (similar ratios can be seen just looking at recent mods).

I appreciate it's almost impossible to make a 100% fair system but maybe some sort of maths could be applied to factor in the game's overall popularity and give modders of less popular games a chance to get something significant from the pot?
Something like - take the number of unique downloads for the period for each mod, then divide by the total number of unique downloads for all mods for that game only over the same period, multiplied by (say) 100 to avoid too many 0.xxx numbers (unnecessary step, but handier for this example). This gives a figure that represents the popularity of the mod among nexus users of that specific game. For the sake of this example let's call that figure AP (Andy Points - what an ego eh?). Then use the number of AP to determine the number of DP (and therefore cash etc) each mod gets.

Example using made up (but vaguely plausible) figures for simplicity -

Albert makes a mod for Morrowind which gets 100 uniques in the first period. The total number for the game in that period is 1000.
Brenda makes a similar mod for Oblivion and gets 1000 uniques. Total for the game 10,000.
Chuck makes again a similar mod for Skyrim and gets 10,000 uniques. Total for the game 100,000.

Using your example figures from the FAQ, there are 2 DP to assign per unique. So, (without applying my idea), Albert gets 200 DP, Brenda gets 2000 DP, and Chuck is in the money with 20,000 DP. Each of them gave a similar amount of blood, sweat and tears, and each of them did work that was similarly popular among players of their respective game.

Using my idea, Albert gets (100/1000)x100=10 AP, as does Brenda (1000/10000)x100 and Chuck (10,000/100,000)x100.
Then let's say you've got (as per your FAQ example) 10 million DP to dish out, and a total of (say) 2,000 AP accrued across the site. Divide total DP by total AP, giving you a DP value for that month of 5000 per AP. So our friends above get 50,000 DP each (APxDP value), so $50 (which weirdly turns out to be the example amount in your FAQ). Someone who got 20,000 uniques for Skyrim would get 100,000 DP, someone who got 100 would get 500 DP, so it's still based on popularity, just now within the context of each game.

Does that make any sense? I'm sure there's a more elegant solution. It'd also need working on to avoid someone making a simple mod for a very, very obscure game, getting one download (maybe from a mate), getting 100AP and netting 500,000 DP. Maybe a minimum number of dls to be eligible and the game needs a certain number of mods in that month from unique modders? I'm sure a bit more maths could be applied to even that out. Some sort of taper like they use in benefit calculations. It's been a month since I've had a proper night's sleep, and three decades since I sat in a Maths lesson, so this might all be gibberish. Sorry if it is!

dikr wrote: I see your point and logic. Sadly in the last paragraph you touch on a big problem. Even if you set total unique dl thresholds for games with smaller user groups, the amount of DP per dl will inflate to such an extent that it will become much easier to break the system with fake accounts, to, say accrue 50 unique dl's for yourself to earn a big chunk of that game's monthly 'pot'. (And screwing up the files of the month with crappy mods at the same time).

And also: if you'd spread out even amounts of DP over all the games on Nexus, that would really mininize DP for the more popular game modders as the biggest DP chunk allocated to such a game needs to be divided over 100's of new mods each month rather than a handful in some cases.

Perhaps there could be some token amount of DP given to each and every new mod to balance it out a bit but that might promote people abusing the system by uploading as many as they can ... hard to solve the question. I guess we have to live with the fact that modding for less popular games means less DP. (People mainly do it for the fun and the sharing anyway so to me personally that's not a biggy).

Morghean wrote: There's a limited way that can filter out abuse of unique downloads, limited, as there's no sure fire method for it - or at least, I don't know it. IP address control. Like limiting the accounts to be created/used from the same IP address, therefore limiting the way someone could generate more unique downloads for their mods. The only weak point in this is internet cafes...

Now I'd like to extend andyjs' idea of equality across popular and less popular games, by stating, that a fixed number of divider (based on the game's age/overall popularity) is not good enough.

The divider itself should be based on statistics of the many factors of game's popularity, like unique downloads, posted mods, images, videos or feedback and of course their age. Which all boils down to the number, of ~relatively~ how many people are actually bothered with that particular game (per a set time interval). And yeah, bothering with older games should be a bonus, but really slight, not that much as andyjs have suggested.
We could also add things like the mod authors' frequency of visiting their own mods: checking on feedback, adding or repairing their own mod (newer version available, optional files available), how much they advertise their mods with Nexus (how many features are used that the site provides.. like writing a change log in it's own tab; bug report tab, adding images, videos). If you do a through out job to make your mod more appealing and informative, you could get a better rating to those who just upload in bulk.

Due to hardware issues, I'm limited to FO3/TES4 modding (and to be honest, I like those a lot more, than the newest versions of them), but I don't think, that modders for older games should be on totally equal ground with ones that adds content to newer games. So the idea of (andyjs') having 10 "AP" for Albert, Brenda and Chuck across the board is a bad one. Yes, there should be a _narrow_ difference between old and new games, but really slight. With the above additions (using statistics) would result a much fairer result, in my opinion.

andyjs wrote: Morghean - you're absolutely right, and some of what you suggest crossed my mind too. However, I saw somewhere (possibly the FAQ) that they've ruled out using anything other than Unique Downloads to make the calculations. So I tried to come up with something that would be fairer but only use that stat. All of the maths I did was really just to highlight the issue, and provide some sort of solution instead of just saying "wah it's not fair"!

dikr - Indeed. I still think it's a fixable issue by someone cleverer than me applying some sort of algorithm. I'm sure somewhere among all that stuff about logs and sine curves there's something that could do the trick. I just can't remember what all that stuff does anymore. Even something simple, like, if unique dls for a mod is less than 100, then they can only keep a percentage of the calculated DP based on the number of dls. So 1 download, you only get 1% of the DP, 73 downloads you keep 73%. 100 seems a reasonable point to say ok, you deserve it all.

matortheeternal wrote: anyjs: I don't think that makes any sense. DP should be distributed to creators on the Nexus platform based on the impact they have relative to other creators, regardless of the game they're creating content for. DP cannot be weighed against the "quality" of the content as that is not feasible to measure, it can only be weighed against the "impact" of the content, which can be roughly determined the number of unique downloads weighed against the total of all unique downloads on the entire platform (which is the platform's total impact). The only thing I could think of is allowing users to donate into DP pools for specific games. It wouldn't be too great an increase in technical complexity and it would mean someone who only uses Morrowind mods donating into the DP pool won't have 95% of their money going to authors who exclusively create mods for other games.

andyjs wrote: matortheeternal - thanks for sharing your thoughts. You may be right. There's an argument to be made that says it's fair enough to reward based on the popularity of the chosen game, because you're providing to the majority. The people have chosen Skyrim and Fallout 4 as the games they use mods for the most so fair enough. To be clear, not a criticism of "the people", I like those games a lot too.
It's probably the great big lefty snowflake in me, but it just seems a bit wrong to me (especially as fixable) that someone can make (for example) a single outfit for Skyrim (not that that doesn't take effort or talent) that is downloaded by a small proportion of Skyrim players, and they'll do a lot better financially than if they'd made a fully-featured, full voice cast adventure for Oblivion or something that is downloaded by a high proportion of Oblivion players. I guess that's how the world works, oh well.
I get the impression this is all moot and the ship has sailed on this anyway, but it's been interesting thinking about it. Anyhoo, back to Fallout, gotta go kill some muties and find a nice outfit for Piper.

matortheeternal wrote: There are other problems with your proposition. It would weigh new games with very few mods disproportionately heavily. Consider a hypothetical game, we'll call it H, which has only one mod, M, by a single author, A. In this hypothetical scenario, A would receive a lion share of DP because they make the only mod for the game. It simply doesn't make sense to distribute DP equally between each game the Nexus supports.

matortheeternal - Oh I know, I mentioned a similar scenario in the last para of my original post (I don't blame anyone for not getting that far!). Proposed a possible solution in one of the replies (i.e. apply a taper). Edited May 29, 2018 by andyjs

[Fielran]

I like this system in general, and I think it has the potential to boost the community especially as computer parts and modding tools become available in the store. I have three minor suggestions.

1. The default DP permission should perhaps be "contact me." Defaulting to "allowed to use" not only makes it look as though people have given permission when they haven't, it makes it hard to tell if someone has actually given permission deliberately.

2. I'd like to see a permission option whereby people can use assets in for example a conversion, port, or patch and gain DP with permission of the author of the original mod, similar to the asset use option "Other user's assets".

3. It would be useful in some cases to have an option to give a share of DP to another mod rather than a mod author, so that DP given to that mod would be split among authors of that mod. Particularly in the case of large mods with multiple authors, the proportions for authors on the original mod could be changed when someone joins or leaves the team without having to contact everyone who is sharing DP individually to ask them to change their proportions.