Just to clarify for everyone, only this clown’s DLSS 3 mod (3 as in frame generation) is paywalld. His dlss 2 mod (2 as in normal dlss) is free on nexus.
Starfield players pirate the DLSS mod after the developer locks it behind paywall
Submitted 1 year ago by heimy@lemm.ee to games@lemmy.world
Comments
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
stigmata@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t feel bad for anyone pushing a subscription model.
frododouchebaggins@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Gaming community reaction to new games in 2023:
Starfield: install these community mods to get the game to look good, 9/10, GOTY candidate.
Jedi Survivor: some performance issues but overall complete, 2/10
BG3: same issues as Jedi Survivor but no one cares, 10/10, definite GOTY
CordanWraith@aussie.zone 1 year ago
To be fair to Starfield, if you’re playing on the recommended hardware it runs incredibly well. I’m running a 7900xt and a Ryzen 7600X and the lowest fps I have with everything on ultra at 1440p is 80, don’t need any mods.
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Diablo 4 technically flawless? The game barely works to this day. Just check the patch notes of how many abilities weren’t working. It’s still awesome but lol
georgette@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Jedi survivor and Baldur’s gate 3 are in very different genres. Performance issues in a turn based game is way more forgivable imo
RHSJack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ghost of Tsushima: narrative masterpiece, evokes the sensibilities of a time and place, despite (very) infrequent frame stuttering–particularly if there are large crowds. F-
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 year ago
BG3 one is so true. The game is clunky and finicky as hell. Everyone praising it as being polished breaks my brain.
Psythik@lemm.ee 1 year ago
DLSS 3 is way better than 2, so I pirated the shit out of that mod. Frame Generation is a game changer. It’s like a magic button that gives you an extra 30-60 FPS for free. Never understood the hate.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
DLSS 3 is far worse than DLSS 2 IMO.
There’s basically zero disadvantage to turning on DLSS 2. Must of the time you cannot or can barely tell the difference.
DLSS 3 introduces lots of artifacting, some frames straight up look like DALL-E image, it adds input lag, and it needs you to already have a high framerate to start with to make it bearable, text in particular gets mangled by it.
Fast paced games and games that rely on quick reactions are a no-go for DLSS 3. It’s suitable for games like MS flight sim where adding input lag doesn’t really matter and there’s not rapid movement.
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
Why do people hate on it? I thought ot was pretty clear that it’s great. Unfortunately i can’t use it since I have a 3080.
forgotaboutlaye@kbin.social 1 year ago
Does this type of mod break with updates, or could you potentially just stay on the version you downloaded and forego any updates? I don't mod much to the point where I've paid for any, but curious the requisite of ongoing subscription for this type of thing.
ridethisbike@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It could. No way to tell for sure until it happens
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
That’s a good question. I’m not sure but I’d assume it would break with updates. I was thinking more about just updates the author makes to make the mod better. Likely he’ll keep working on making it better but you can bet your booty thay he’ll keep making kinor updates once a month to milk his subsciber’s money. Patreon is a fucking scam.
Ganbat@lemmyonline.com 1 year ago
That McFly guy has been riding the “It’ll be released soon™” train for something like five years at this point.
Stern@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Personally I find it hard to care as I won’t be playing the game for longer then a month anyhow. That said, real easy to wait for someone else to drop a dlss3 mod or just go without.
stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Even easier to download the mod from someone else.
dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Okay but Martys RTGI is great and works in quite alot of games without much tinkering (just need to access depth buffer), don’t mind paying for it
stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“I don’t mind buying my own painting and then paying monthly for it to have some details filled in that eventually get painted over anyway at some rate”
Is it morally wrong to have someone spy on the detail painter and copy their techniques? (In this metaphor techniques are DLSS implementation, not the paint (DLSS itself))
Kirkkh@lemm.ee 1 year ago
So I take it somebody else is providing a dlss 3 mod for free then?
mekwall@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes, it already exists on Nexus, and without ReShade, but it is currently crashing the game a lot for users.
IHeartBadCode@kbin.social 1 year ago
Out of this whole thing, I just want to say something about this.
Some players' reactions to the paywall have been unfavorable; they think that charging for mods is unethical and goes against the spirit of community modification
Everyone needs to make bread. Someone asking for money from their mod or map or whatever isn’t against any spirit. It’s just a human being asking to make bread. Now some don’t agree with the price tag and that’s fine.
But we all need to recognize humans asking for some dough for their hard work is in the spirit of existing. Some folk do it for free just for the feelings and we love ‘em for it. But those asking for some cash are no different.
This world is already full of dog eat dog. Let’s not hate on someone just trying to get through it. You don’t have to pay the ask, but let’s not go making enemies just cause we don’t agree on that number on the price tag.
Mini_Moonpie@startrek.website 1 year ago
I am not disagreeing with the premise that it’s fair for someone to be paid for their work. However, during the Skyrim paid mod controversy (on Steam), I learned that there a lot of situations where having paid mods did hurt the modding community and created ethical concerns.
- Mods were being stolen and sold by people that were not the actual mod authors.
- Mods were being sold that depended on larger, more complicated mods to function, but the payment was not shared with the larger mod.
- Mods that had multiple contributors were being sold by an individual who was not sharing the money with the other contributors.
- Players were concerned about being asked to pay for bug fix mods when the developer should be fixing their own game. This is of course, was not the modders fault and does not mean their bug fix mod wasn’t valuable or deserving of pay, but many felt the developer should pay for it, not users.
I would also point out that it wasn’t just greedy players that complained about paid mods - a lot of modders thought it went against the spirit of modding because of how it harmed collaboration in the community. Suddenly, they couldn’t trust that others would not steal their work or profit from it unfairly. And, that seems like a reasonable take to me, given all the abuses that modders claimed happened in the short time that paid modding was a thing for Skyrim on Steam.
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It feels like the issue is that it was offering the convenience of payment to mods, but not really thinking about the necessary friction of assuring licenses/legality/etc. All of that CAN, of course, be an issue for cheap Unity games too. I remember back when Steam Greenlight started, they required each game to donate $100 to charity to even be considered, basically placing a bet of assurance that it wasn’t a stolen asset flip (I don’t know if they still do that).
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I remember that discourse and am going to call shenanigans. None of that was new and a lot applies to actual software development
- Mods have been plagiarized for as long as their were mods. It was pretty common to find out that mod A stole scripts or even assets from mod B and that mod C is just completely bundling in an outdated version of mod D. “Gamers” generally don’t care and would shit on any creator who wanted credit because they were “causing drama”. I personally know two different Oblivion modders who bailed on “the scene” after someone straight up stole their interiors for one of the high profile mods.
- Utility and support libraries are a thing. Been a minute, but I want to say it was two years ago that almost the entire internet ran the risk of shutting down because someone pulled their color code package out of npm?
- This has always been true and was a big part of the “drama” about the Make Something Unreal contest. But you also get people who try to become “rockstar developers” because they are the main creator. Kojima is notorious for this but a decent number of the folk who came out of the modding scene did the same shit.
- THIS is somewhat unique to Bethesda’s development “model” but, like with DLC, people have a tendency to very much stretch the truth. There was a prototype of a character six years before the DLC about that character was released? Fucking developers are just cutting content so they can sell it to us later!
I am not saying any of these aren’t issues and I do think that adding monetized mods a decade in to the life cycle of a game was a mistake. But, like with most things, if The People are suddenly fixated on and caring about something they had outright mocked a few weeks prior… they still don’t care. They just see a way to be morally righteous while they get what they want.
mojo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
You don’t go into modding for the money. It’s like making a non profit for the money. That’s why they’re getting backlash, they’re asking money where money’s not supposed to be involved.
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is such a shitty attitude 🤣
God forbid we pay for a fucking cup of coffee because that person should want to work for free. This is the same bullshit as “work hard play hard” and “we are family here”. Might as well start telling modders it’s not about the pay, it’s the people and experience we’re paying you in. Rent what’s that?
Lols@lemm.ee 1 year ago
it’s like theyre making a non profit for the money, except the without the making a non profit part
Kirkkh@lemm.ee 1 year ago
There are tons of paid mods for lots of games. Me thinking it’s just Bethesda fans
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
a mod list for Skyrim is bugfixes, a few UI/UX fixes, a graphics mod or two, and… that is it.
You’re fucking with us, right? RIGHT?? 😂
CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Wtf are you talking about, Skyrim has dozens of amazing quest mods, and hundreds of quest mods overall.
It has major gameplay overhauls, it has custom skeletons for animation, it literally has mods that rework the animation system entirely,
There are mods that add new continents ffs, what’re you talking about? One of the quest mods was so good it literally got turned into its own game.
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
Remember, the patreon sub is $5/MONTH. This means if you buy 1 month at $5 to download the mod, and the author “conveniently” comes out with an update one month later, you need to subscibe for another $5. So basically it’s a fucking subscription for a god damn dlss 3 mod. You know the author is milking this bullshit to keep subscibers and keep his income flowing. Marty mcfly does the same fucking dogshit with his stupid ass RTGI reshade shaders. Fuck that shit. Those people can go get fucked.
wahming@monyet.cc 1 year ago
Ultimately, the guy is being upfront with his pricing and what he’s asking for. What’s the reason to hate on him? Either it’s worth it at that price or it’s not.
MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For real. You want it for free? Cool go ahead and make the mod yourself. All the tools are there. Wait, you don’t want to spend your time learning to code? You don’t want to spend your time learning modding tools. Our time is our most finite resource and you get mad when someone asks for something in return for theirs? People are just up their own asses.
UlrikHD@programming.dev 1 year ago
The game has just launched and the mod had been released and cracked already. This isn’t about making bread, it’s clearly a trivial hack for him to do, not something that requires full time job maintenence.
People spend hundreds of hours modding free of charge, what he does is a joke in comparison if we are talking about lost time that could have been spent earning money. The groundwork was made by Bethesda, AMD and Nvidia.
Mandy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Suddenly paylocked mod gets pirated? Imagine my shock
SirQuackTheDuck@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s like downloading Limewire Pro with Limewire, totally unexpected.
Squander@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wouldnt be surprised if his patreon gets hacked or at least a cease and desist.
stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Bahahahah
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Piracy is always ethical
panda_paddle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So the mod creator deserves nothing for their time and work?
borth@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The modder also locked the DLSS3 mod behind a paywall, and players also pirated that 🤣
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No, DLSS3 was the only one he wanted $5 for.
Grant_M@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Lazy game devs should release finished optimized products.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How to say you know nothing about game development but want to assert your opinion on it anyways without actually saying it.
It’s corporate profiteering not lazy devs. The devs work their asses off, these aren’t their decisions to make.
Grant_M@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The more people defend the lazy game devs, the more crappy half finished games we will get.
TheBlue22@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I understand when massive, dlc sized mods are monetized. Not when small ones are.
For example in minecraft, there was a mod with which you could pregenerate your world before making it. The creator decided to gut it and put all the good features behind his patreon.
EdanGrey@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
God forbid someone make money from the things they put time into!
hyper@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I mean at the end of the day its the decision of the developer who put time in it… if you’re not happy with that look for another mod or code your own.
Sure I appreciate free mods but we shouldn’t take them for granted.
csolisr@communities.azkware.net 1 year ago
This reminds me of the McFly ray tracing plugin for ReShade - turns out somebody else has already made an open-source alternative
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
Marty McFly is a fucking tool for paywalling his mediocre shaders.
csolisr@communities.azkware.net 1 year ago
Well he managed to snag a sponsorship from Nvidia thanks to his shenanigans. Which probably says more about Nvidia than about the guy, to be honest.
Graphine@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t have a problem with some mods being sold. My issue is when you price it initially for free and THEN decide later to charge money for it. That’s within your rights of course, but don’t expect people to not get pissed off enough to pirate it.
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
ITT: A gross misunderstanding about how mod and DLSS/RTX licencing works.
Folks act like modding is a constitutional right and not expressly allowed within TOS. Guys of Bethesda wanted to go full on piss on the community they could shut all of it MPAA style. They choose to let modders use and monitize their assets.
RTX is fully redistributable without modification as long as it’s used on Nvidia hardware.
FluorideMind@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They choose to do that because the community caries their games. I wouldn’t own a single beth game if they didn’t have mod support.
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And? I’m just informing everyone bitching about the legal issues who lack a fundamental understanding of the aforementioned documents.
stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 year ago
ITT: Bitching “the old ways were better” user clearly doesn’t understand the hipocricy of charging for mods when devs didn’t pay for access themselves.
What you get to be the only person who profits? Not the companies who made the rest of the fucking game so you can copy and paste some fucking stackoverflow implementation posts?
Dev needs to get real - enjoy that bite in your ass. Fees for thee but not for me
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wat?
Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Okay is gamescensor written by actual people, or just some generative learning SEO site? Because wow this is a mess of an article.
The mod replaces the FSR2 upscaling technology included in the game (which is made for AMD graphics cards)
FSR2 works on every major graphics card
a more modern upscaler that is compatible with more recent Nvidia cards.
Wat?
PureDark, who claimed to make more than $40,000
Nope some one else extrapolated that data from a patreon page.
It may be because AMD is “Starfield’s exclusive PC partner” and only supports FSR2 technology at launch that the game only does so.
Wat again?!?
p5f20w18k@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This isn’t anything new, there’s some community software locked behind paywalls like patreon already. Doesn’t mean we have to like it though.
Then again, DLSS is an nvidia product, so there’s a legal issue here I think.
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
DLSS is free to redistribute. …nvidia.com/…/nvidia-rtx-sdks-license-23jan2023pd….
stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nah it’s free to use tech, but yes the dev is indeed still charging for something that they themselves could have to pay for but don’t.
Only the mod dev gets to make money, not any of the hundreds of people (if not more) working on the base game.
Come on man it’s fine, charge the little guy, big guy make more money. It’s simple /s
tinsuke@lemmy.world 1 year ago
… supports DLSS3, a more modern upscaler that is compatible with more recent Nvidia cards.
Gotta love errors in tech articles.
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
PureDark, who claimed to make more than $40,000 per month from locking DLSS3 mods behind their Patreon page,
Make that 50k, his current patreon page shows over 10k members. There’s stuff for several games there, tho, like RDR2, Last of Us 2, Elden Ring, Fallout 4, etc.
Seems there’s plenty of space for competitors to enter the “offer DLSS mods for games that don’t have it”
If I was earning that much per month, I wouldn’t worry about taking extra time to add DRM to my stuff. Despite the cracked version floating around, he got more subscribers since the first stories came around and he’s at zero risk of suffering any significant loss. Pirate that shit with a clean conscience
sirfancy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Man, and I was just about to get that mod too. Really scummy.
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
God forbid you pay an individual for writing the code.
Fubar91@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just use one of the 6 other DLSS bridge mods kekw.
CaptainAlcohol@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Idk, here they are pirating stuff a the expenses of a single modder from what I gather. And just to sava 5 usd? Really? A soft drink costs more and it’s probably unhealthy. There’s work behind these things, that ain’t free, you get it?
cmhe@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sure modders can put stuff behind paywalls, but implementing DRM, is overkill. And it would be nice if they release month old versions for free afterwards, so I have to see. Starfield isn’t that old yet.
BTW, I am not really getting the FSR/DLSS situation.
Shouldn’t FSR2 be working on Nvidia gpus as well and is open source? DLSS is propritary and only works on Nvidia.
So I am not really understanding the issue here, other than customers of Nvidia not having FSR2 because Nvidia hasn’t implemented the open standard, right? So they should complain to them about it.
IMO this is a bit like the fediverse vs. other social media topic, if I would complain to people creating their own propritary stuff, that is incompatible with the fediverse, and not about people that implement fediverse, but not the propritary API.
set_secret@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think the Nms skins are looking great
Boiglenoight@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The year is 2023. Gamers are expected to pay for the ability to utilize a feature built into their videocard. A true dystopia.
Kirkkh@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I mean won’t they just not provide the mod next time? Or stop supporting it? How is this good?
Piecemakers3Dprints@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Called it! 😱🤣🤘🏼
tal@kbin.social 1 year ago
DLSS is a proprietary Nvidia feature that lets the image be rendered at a lower resolution while making it not appear as degraded as would normally be the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling
Deep learning super sampling (DLSS) is a family of real-time deep learning image enhancement and upscaling technologies developed by Nvidia that are exclusive to its RTX line of graphics cards, and available in a number of video games. The goal of these technologies is to allow the majority of the graphics pipeline to run at a lower resolution for increased performance, and then infer a higher resolution image from this that approximates the same level of detail as if the image had been rendered at this higher resolution. This allows for higher graphical settings and/or frame rates for a given output resolution, depending on user preference.
I expect that the mod enables that functionality and that the modders is charging for it and that people who don't want to pay for it are pirating it.
From what I've read, Starfield generally performs better on AMD cards, so I imagine that there's particular interest from Nvidia users in figuring out some performance tweaks.
kadu@lemmy.world 1 year ago
beefcat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The author wasn’t selling DLSS, they were selling a shim to make it work with Starfield. That does require original work.
kadu@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Bodongs@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do you copy and paste comments from reddit? I read this exact comment last night I am SURE of it
woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So NVidia’s DLLs for DLSS are not included? (Honest question, I don’t even own the game.)
million@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If it’s so trivial to do why doesn’t everyone do it on their own?
If it’s any easy mod to replicate it seems like it won’t have much self life as a paid mod.
kadu@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Kirkkh@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Angry (poor) Redditors are out in force today I see.
Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
If it’s not anything special, someone else could just “easily” reproduce it instead of having to pirate it?
Rehwyn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They have, literally just a few hours slower than this guy charging people: www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/761
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Can you link where it says you can’t redistribute DLSS? The Dev guide starts pretty clearly it’s free to use with Nvidia gpus.
…nvidia.com/…/nvidia-rtx-sdks-license-23jan2023pd….
kadu@lemmy.world 1 year ago