You can still be passionate about things and want to get paid. As an artist and content creator myself, the whole dream is to be able to make your original work and make a living just from doing it. Nobody wants to work a 9 to 5 if they're a content creator to support themselves. So I hear what sibroc is saying, loud and clear.
There's going to be some real success stories from this and I am thrilled to see who makes the first million-selling mod.
Fluent, my friend, let's talk about the law of attraction.
We're both familiar with it, and we both subscribe to it.
One tenet of the law of attraction - and one thing that attraction experts from Alan Watts to Wayne Dyer have said is that you put your passion first. Never do it with the expectation of money, because the money will never come. Create from your heart without thinking about money and then the money will flow to you. Whether it's through your creative work or from some other way will always depend on the situation. But it'll happen.
Mod authors have been making incredible work for years and years now with no expectation of getting paid. And some of the best have been rewarded by being hired by big companies like Bethesda or CDPR, or they've gone on to make their own successful games. What everyone's saying here is that that spirit is gone now. It's sucked out by the pursuit of the nickels and dimes from the iPhone microtransaction mentality that has finally invaded a space that was full of passion until just recently. When we could, most of us happily gave tips. The mod authors deserved it, and those of us that could afford it would happily keep giving 'coffee money' as genuine gratitude for long hours spent and a job well done. It was money freely given. It felt good to give, and I'm sure it felt good to receive, because it meant something. It was given and received with gratitude.
Now, this capitalist mafia shakedown is likely to invade every aspect of modding. A lot of people on this side of the argument have talked about "innocence lost", and what they mean is, once you introduce money, you can't take it back out again. It's an expectation. It's a Pandora's Box.
The soulless pursuit of money is the opposite of a joyous life. What does one of the guys in The Secret say? You go after the money and you might get rich but you'll never be happy.
Any artist that becomes an artist (or writer, or musician, or anything else) in a quest to get rich is a fool or they're naive. It never happens that way. But maybe, if they pour their heart into it with no thought of money, the money will come. And regardless, they've made the best art when they don't think about money. My writing only got to the point where I'm happy with it when I stopped thinking about a paycheck. But that's just me.
I've rambled too long repeating what other people have said here with more brevity. I just hope this makes sense.
This is Bethesda and corporate parasite behavior. And that's all it is. There's no pouring sunshine on it. It's a cash grab.
They're taking advantage of us, and they're taking advantage of some talented artists.
