The history of monetization and mods is a pretty complex one.

Back in the UT/Quake 3 era, it was not at all uncommon to pay someone to make a skin or model for you. Those would be put online “for free”, but the Influencers of the era (clan folk and prolific forum posters) would get the warm and fuzzies from knowing there was a 420_JustBlazeIt_696969 skin for the nali warcow.

The first time I can really think of there being actual premium content you had to pay for was Neverwinter Nights and, to a lesser extent, The Sims. Yeah, there were the titties and fucking mods and the better ones were behind paywalls. But NWN in particular had a few cases where prolific modders might want some cash to give you access to their really cool campaigns. And Atari/Bioware took advantage of that for premium mods (although, I don’t think any community mods ever got an official release? I know AL3 or AL4 was supposed to be but ended up getting released for free when the program ended).

But that was arguably the beginning of the end for the golden age of mods. Because a year or two later we had Unreal Tournament 2003/4 and the “Make Something Unreal” contest. Which was a competition held by epic where the best mods in different categories would get huge cash prizes and games like Red Orchestra actually came out of this. And… it almost instantly killed the modding community. Sure we got Chaos UT2k4 and a few others, but basically every large modding effort was part of this contest rather than “for fun”.

And… the reality is that the contest and atari’s half ass efforts were pointless. Because the reality is that, by the early 2000s, modding was of comparable difficulty to making a game from scratch. And tools kept getting better (UT became The Unreal Engine, if that is not obvious) and between UE and Unity it was a lot easier for people to just make their dream games and sell them rather than make a mod for someone else’s game.

The Bethesda games side was a lot more gradual. There wasn’t a massive exodus of modders but… the number of quality quest mods for Morrowind versus Oblivion and Skyrim very much shows that the particularly talented folk were off doing other stuff. And a lot of the old hats realize this. A mod list for Morrowind might have been hundreds of quests. A mod list for Skyrim is bugfixes, a few UI/UX fixes, a graphics mod or two, and… that is it. Like, you still get the occasional magnum opus. But… yeah.

So you get this push back over the idea of modding “dying” even more. Because people aren’t going to put in hundreds of hours of work to give something away when they can do the same work and get paid for it. But… that also means they aren’t putting in 10 hours of work to make a hilariously bad map that simulates what it is like to have Comcast internet.

And then you just have the children who throw a temper tantrum the moment they are deprived of something they want.