Please Do Not Monetize Mods, It is a Terrible Idea#2799

I write this out of nothing but love for TTS over these past 10 years.

The monetization of mods goes against the entire philosophy that TTS and its community is built upon. Even before considering all the times other games have attempted this and failed miserably, this goes against everything TTS’ playerbase stands for.

Modding is a passion that we collectively do to share the love of board gaming with others, with no strings attached.

Mods for Tabletop Simulator are especially unique; Mods objectively should stay completely unmonetized because there is an understanding that the experience will never compare to purchasing the actual physical board games they are based on. Introducing monetization completely blurs this clearly defined line that makes up the digital-vs-physical debate about whether we should even be allowed to upload scans of physical retail games in the first place.

Introducing monetization to TTS will ruin the culture the TTS community has spent cultivating together for the past 10 years because of this very change in philosophy.

Not only that, it would introduce controversy over moderation and never-ending anger/frustration over fairness of what the moderation team decides can or can’t be monetized. Controversy will also break out regarding whether or not modders should be paid when they upload, modify, or copy others’ intellectual property/products/projects without direct consent, which WILL happen.

It must be remembered that moderation/curation is reactive and not pre-emptive. Many will abuse the system long before they are caught.

A malicious modder could easily scan and lightly change elements of others’ work to claim that it is original (essentially theft), and be paid for it using the very same systems TTS would willingly support. This would be nearly impossible to curate, because there would be a “technically” defensible argument that such stolen content is original and transformative, even when anyone with common sense would be able to tell that it isn’t.

The addition of monetizing mods would also incentivize people to maximize profits while minimizing effort simply because there is money involved, when there never was such an issue up to this point.

There are so many reasons for why this is a bad idea, and I wouldn’t even be able to list them all here.

Modding is a passion, not a job. Workshop developers who want money for their hard work have plenty of ways outside of the game to do so, and it should stay that way.