A bounty system for mods?

[shadowlid 11]

I have been pondering this idea for some time now.

Lets say I want a certain mod for Arma 3 lets say a F22 not a port from arma 2 but a redesigned one with stealth technologies, interactive cock pit, real thrust vectoring similar to the real jet etc etc. I think it would be helpful to have a fund set up be it PayPal or what ever that people can pre donate to and the person who develops the exact mod to the specifications of the community gets the money at the discretion of the community. I say have a trial like our military does.

Here is my idea on the structure of this.

I start a thread stating what I would like to see in the mod. Then have a set time for others in the community to put in their input on it. Say 3 weeks. At the end of the 3 weeks put it to a vote for the final product expected. Then set a goal for the amount to be donated say $300. Once this is set see if there is any one in the developing community that wants to take on the challenge for that price. If there is multiple people then do this also like the military does the winner takes all. If all this works and devs take on the challenge start donating. (And I say let all who donate be part of the testing of mods as they develop this would be another incentive to donate.) Then when all devs have a final product let the community test the mods vote on the best one and then the winner gets the prize money.

Of course a very trusted person would have to be in control of the money, fund, etc. Say a administrator on the fourm or I don’t know im open to ideas. Maybe charge a small fee for the mod be it .20 cents. I mean if you get 3000 downloads that would be $600 bucks! I would pay .20 cents for a mod all day long!

This would make developing rewarding to the developers as well as the community in getting what they want? Also it would drive the developers to put in their all on the mod which in turn would make for some great stable mods!!!

What do you guys think? Do you think it would work?

I don’t mind paying for other peoples work I mean the FA18 on arma 2 and amra 2 have given me countless hours of play time and that to me is worth some reward to the person that put in countless hours of work just to let us have what we want!

Best regards,

Shadowlid

Also before someone says that Bohemia already has a contest going this would be different because they only offer one prize per category and the community really does not have any input its just devs making what they want.

Edited February 2, 2014 by Shadowlid

[Tonci87 163]

Can´t be done because of license issues

[scrim 1]

What an awful, terrible idea. What's up with gamers thinking that throwing money on people will solve all the problems that any game could ever have?

Just to point out some very obvious flaws: It takes a lot longer to make a decent addon than $300US would compensate, so you're gonna need a whole lot more. As it is, the modders create things because they want to, not to make money. If you want to change that, you need to provide more than less than half a weeks worth of salaries.

Second, how would you determine which of the mods is the best one, at a stage when people have already donated money, without a massive conflict that will see half the people involved banned/having left the forums and quite possibly the Arma series in disgust?

And for who to trust with the money: There's a huge difference between entrusting someone to do amateur forum moderating (as in unpaid), and holding on to thousands and thousands of dollars.

[TMoney 11]

:cough: kickstarter :cough: : puke :

[shadowlid 11]

What an awful, terrible idea. What's up with gamers thinking that throwing money on people will solve all the problems that any game could ever have?

Just to point out some very obvious flaws: It takes a lot longer to make a decent addon than $300US would compensate, so you're gonna need a whole lot more. As it is, the modders create things because they want to, not to make money. If you want to change that, you need to provide more than less than half a weeks worth of salaries.

Second, how would you determine which of the mods is the best one, at a stage when people have already donated money, without a massive conflict that will see half the people involved banned/having left the forums and quite possibly the Arma series in disgust?

And for who to trust with the money: There's a huge difference between entrusting someone to do amateur forum moderating (as in unpaid), and holding on to thousands and thousands of dollars.

This was just a idea man all Theoretical. I would just like to reward the deveolpers for there hard work i know $300 would not even touch the work that went into a good mod.

[MissionCreep 12]

If you truly desire something, how about you put in the effort to realize it yourself? There is a huge amount of free expertise and advice on these forums and there are free tools available. There is probably no better person to create what you want than you yourself.

[Ezcoo 47]

I think the core idea is actually very good (I've been hoping for a bit similar system for long time), but the suggestion of realization has some issues.

According to the devs themselves, they're working on mod support in the Steam Workshop (woohoo!) which would allow centralized mod control with extensive statistics. Those statistics could be used to track the popularity of any mod relatively accurately. Based on the data of popularity of mods, a formula describing the value of the mod and a reward system implemented on it could be made quite easily.

Binding a monthly (or maybe even weekly) paycheck to the popularity of mod would motivate the developers to prefer long-term approach to the modding, that would result in

- remarkably higher quality of the mods, because the best modders could work on their mods full time, motivation of long-term approach to development and assumably higher interest from modders thanks to relatively stable, low-risk and rewarding reward system

- continued support of content (that is very, very critical now that the game is updated so regularly), as no-one would play broken content, so the lacking updates (broken content) would result in sudden loss of income and thus motivate the content creators to keep their content updated and working without issues

- an effective and quite autonomous way to find new employees from the Bohemia's perspective.

I don't think that creating the content first and getting paid after that would be an issue at all (rather vice versa), as the great majority of content creators do it because they love it, not because they'd want to make money and on the other hand, the content "made with love" tends to be much higher quality than the content made from purely commercial reasons. Business consults would call this a win-win situation, as Bohemia would get more sales thanks to the high quality of mods and the content creators would get paid for their hard work (that they'd deserve absolutely).

I'm not claiming this to be a perfect solution and I'm sure there would be ways to abuse this too, but I think the possible abuse and the outcomes of it would be minimal compared to the benefits that it would bring.

TL;DR, create content and get paid the more the more popular it is. Bohemia gets more sales, you get paid for your work. Everyone wins. Profit.

[Harzach 2517]

TL;DR, create content and get paid the more the more popular it is. Bohemia gets more sales, you get paid for your work. Everyone wins. Profit.

Where is the money coming from? Any additional one-time sales won't be enough to offset the recurring payouts to modders, and basing the system on those additional sales is too much of a gamble to begin with. Another revenue stream would have to be introduced.

[Ezcoo 47]

Where is the money coming from? Any additional one-time sales won't be enough to offset the recurring payouts to modders, and basing the system on those additional sales is too much of a gamble to begin with. Another revenue stream would have to be introduced.

Could you please clarify this a bit? I'm not sure if I got your point (excuse my stupidity).

However, assuming that I understood you correctly, the money would be coming from the game budget itself, not from any dedicated budget. With that I mean that the cashflow could be temporarily negative, meaning modders being paid more than what would be got from the additional sales (there even isn't a really accurate way to meter the additional sales indicated by the mods). Despite of the negative cashflow during the beginning, I believe that the investment would be returned multiplied in the long term. In terms of sales and economy, the key point would be to pay attention to the big picture, not to the details.

[Harzach 2517]

...the money would be coming from the game budget itself, not from any dedicated budget. With that I mean that the cashflow could be temporarily negative, meaning modders being paid more than what would be got from the additional sales (there even isn't a really accurate way to meter the additional sales indicated by the mods).

Outflow (payouts to modders) requires inflow (new sales). As more modders enter the system, outflow increases, requiring additional inflow. Basing the system on the uncertainty of ever-increasing sales is what is called "a terrible business plan". The only way it would really work would be for a new, sustainable revenue stream to be introduced. This is how things like pay-to-play or micro-transactions happen. No, thank you.

Despite of the negative cashflow during the beginning, I believe that the investment would be returned multiplied in the long term.

How? From where?

In terms of sales and economy, the key point would be to pay attention to the big picture, not to the details.

Easy enough to say from where we sit. However, for a company with ~200 employees, "the details" includes things like paying rent, utilities, salaries, insurance, and other overhead costs.

[mamasan8 11]

I think this would lead to mods costing money meaning less people enjoying them (less people buy them) and in the end the mod scene might be quite dead.

If you think money motivates people, think again.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv/

"...employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money). Quite simply, you’re more likely to like your job if you focus on the work itself, and less likely to enjoy it if you’re focused on money."

Intrinsic motivators = enjoyment, sheer curiosity, learning or personal challenge.

This also plays into problemsolving. I saw some video where three groups of people got either 2 weeks salaries, 1 month salaries or 2 month salaries for solving a problem. Guess who was most motivated? Not the 2 month salary-group. They also performed poorly on the problemsolving task.

Found the video:

Skip to 3:30 or something.

Edited February 7, 2014 by mamasan8

[Ezcoo 47]

Outflow (payouts to modders) requires inflow (new sales). As more modders enter the system, outflow increases, requiring additional inflow. Basing the system on the uncertainty of ever-increasing sales is what is called "a terrible business plan". The only way it would really work would be for a new, sustainable revenue stream to be introduced. This is how things like pay-to-play or micro-transactions happen. No, thank you.

Here it's called an investment, not a "terrible business plan". If you used that as a rule of thumb with business, you couldn't make any investment ever.

How? From where?

It would be a risk, of course. Any investment is a risk, unless you happen to have a crystal ball that shows you the future. The outflow would probably be higher than the inflow in the beginning, but (assuming that the mod hassle will be automatized with SWS in future) I think that the investment put to it would be returned multiplied as increased inflow.

Note that being "modder" itself would not give you any income, but the popularity of mod would. So there can be thousands of registered modders, but nothing paid to them, if none of their mods wasn't popular at all. So more modders would not increase the outflow automatically. The popularity of mods would be the only factor having effect to the outflow.

I don't see any reason why the income should increase absolutely before the outflow. It would be an investment! Just like with investments in general, the outflow would be higher than inflow in the beginning - it would take some time to make the cashflow positive. The income doesn't have to be linked to the mods themselves in any way, it's absolutely possible to make it so that the mods would be free-of-charge. The money for the outflow would come from the increased sales, not from selling the mods themselves (I think that the pay-to-play or micro-transactions would kill this game.)

I think this would lead to mods costing money meaning less people enjoying them (less people buy them) and in the end the mod scene might be quite dead.

If you think money motivates people, think again.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv/

"...employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money). Quite simply, you’re more likely to like your job if you focus on the work itself, and less likely to enjoy it if you’re focused on money."

Intrinsic motivators = enjoyment, sheer curiosity, learning or personal challenge.

This also plays into problemsolving. I saw some video where three groups of people got either 2 weeks salaries, 1 month salaries or 2 month salaries for solving a problem. Guess who was most motivated? Not the 2 month salary-group. They also performed poorly on the problemsolving task.

Found the video:

Skip to 3:30 or something.

I'm very well aware of the different motivators and their effects, as I'm preparing to start my own business in the future and the motivation psychology is one of the areas that interests me the most. Thanks for good explanation though, you can never learn enough :)

The intrinsic motivators would be dominant still, because (like I wrote in my last reply) the modders would get paid after their mod became popular, not before that. So you have to create good content first, the money comes after that. And like we know, the best content comes from people who do it for fun, so the money would go to those people instead of those who would do it because of the money. That's exactly the reason why the money income would be dependent on the popularity of the mod: to filter out those who are doing it only because of the money, and to get those who love what they do (and thus create the best content) to create even more content than before (or to prevent them from quitting at least).

I'm just seeing way too many good content creators quitting or using much less time to content creation than what they used to, as they can't dedicate their time to the content creation anymore because of RL issues. But if they got enough money from the modding, they could start working on it full time, allowing them to continue and even to use more time to the content creation, or at least continue content creation in their free time. Despite of how much you love content creation, you still need money to live, to get food, pay the taxes and bills etc. That's why you would get paid from creating good mods - to keep you going, allowing you to concentrate on the content creation.

[roshnak 41]

This is a terrible idea. Monetizing content creation will not help anyone but content creators. Some people might be okay with that, but I'd rather Arma not become a marketplace for third party content. Flight sims are a great example of how terribly far this kind of strategy can go, with addons costing as much as, or more than, the game itself. And I don't think anyone can say that Minecraft, with its mods drowning in Adfly links, has a pleasant modding community.

[Ezcoo 47]

This is a terrible idea. Monetizing content creation will not help anyone but content creators. Some people might be okay with that, but I'd rather Arma not become a marketplace for third party content. Flight sims are a great example of how terribly far this kind of strategy can go, with addons costing as much as, or more than, the game itself. And I don't think anyone can say that Minecraft, with its mods drowning in Adfly links, has a pleasant modding community.

Omg. I'm sorry, but do you guys read my replies at all? (Or does my English suck so much that you don't understand me?) I have written multiple times, that the mods would not cost anything to the people who download them. The pay of the content creators would come from the general game budget, not directly from the downloads of mods!

Edited February 7, 2014 by Ezcoo
typo

[Harzach 2517]

Here it's called an investment, not a "terrible business plan". If you used that as a rule of thumb with business, you couldn't make any investment ever.

No, it's called

It would be a risk, of course. Any investment is a risk, unless you happen to have a crystal ball that shows you the future. The outflow would probably be higher than the inflow in the beginning, but (assuming that the mod hassle will be automatized with SWS in future) I think that the investment put to it would be returned multiplied as increased inflow.

Note that being "modder" itself would not give you any income, but the popularity of mod would. So there can be thousands of registered modders, but nothing paid to them, if none of their mods wasn't popular at all. So more modders would not increase the outflow automatically. The popularity of mods would be the only factor having effect to the outflow.

I don't see any reason why the income should increase absolutely before the outflow. It would be an investment! Just like with investments in general, the outflow would be higher than inflow in the beginning - it would take some time to make the cashflow positive. The income doesn't have to be linked to the mods themselves in any way, it's absolutely possible to make it so that the mods would be free-of-charge. The money for the outflow would come from the increased sales, not from selling the mods themselves (I think that the pay-to-play or micro-transactions would kill this game.)

If BI were selling an expendable product (something customers would be buying again and again, like food, or paper products, etc), absorbing the cost of these payouts into the general budget would work. You might occasionally need to introduce improvements to the product, or even new products, but in general, your revenue stream is reliable. For a company that makes non-expendables, increasing sales means constantly introducing new products or services, as the old ones will eventually stop selling. In the case of a game like Arma (or any game, really), you can only expect to see a finite number of sales, most of which will happen relatively close to release, with a steady drop thereafter. Arma 2 saw a great resurgence in sales due to DayZ, but that was an anomaly. In order to get that steady revenue, either an expendable product (subscription fees) or many new products (expansions, "premium" items, etc. - the world of micro-transactions) need to be introduced. The only real way I can see for it to work as you describe would be if the payout amounts were unremarkable.

All of that aside, what would the metric be for who gets paid? The top ten most popular? Top 100? Then it becomes a race to fulfill the desires of the masses - seemingly a logical route to take regardless, but it would actually stifle creativity. And does this system work retroactively to include mods/modders for Arma 2?

I think the idea, while noble, could cause more problems than it is worth.

[Tonci87 163]

This whole discussion is futile. I´ve already written that this can never be implemented. BIS can´t simply go and pay money for good mods. They could get into real trouble for that.

[x3kj 1247]

commercial modding... pretty bad idea. Leads to multiple people doing the same thing and in the end fighting over it... provided it's even worth it.

And then there's the devil thing called copyrights, licenses, etc

Only a fraction of modders have commercial licenses for their software because that stuff is more expensive then the consolidation price they might get from succesfull mods/donations...

@OP

Just create a take and give thread - You state what you wish and offer donation in return.

[vegeta897 13]

If it isn't broken, don't fix it. What's wrong with the current state of the mod community in Arma? It's one of the best I've ever seen. Please don't get money involved.

Also good posts from Harzach.

[Ezcoo 47]

If BI were selling an expendable product (something customers would be buying again and again, like food, or paper products, etc), absorbing the cost of these payouts into the general budget would work. You might occasionally need to introduce improvements to the product, or even new products, but in general, your revenue stream is reliable. For a company that makes non-expendables, increasing sales means constantly introducing new products or services, as the old ones will eventually stop selling. In the case of a game like Arma (or any game, really), you can only expect to see a finite number of sales, most of which will happen relatively close to release, with a steady drop thereafter. Arma 2 saw a great resurgence in sales due to DayZ, but that was an anomaly. In order to get that steady revenue, either an expendable product (subscription fees) or many new products (expansions, "premium" items, etc. - the world of micro-transactions) need to be introduced. The only real way I can see for it to work as you describe would be if the payout amounts were unremarkable.

All of that aside, what would the metric be for who gets paid? The top ten most popular? Top 100? Then it becomes a race to fulfill the desires of the masses - seemingly a logical route to take regardless, but it would actually stifle creativity. And does this system work retroactively to include mods/modders for Arma 2?

I think the idea, while noble, could cause more problems than it is worth.

Thanks for thought-provoking reply. :)

Now that I've been thinking about the idea for some days, I think that you might be right. I still disagree with the part about the importance of extentability, but I agree that it might lead to race to fulfill the desires of the masses (and, as unfortunate as it is, thus also to stifling of creativity like you described). (Btw, in my scenario the pay-o-meter would have been based on absolute values (eg. total played hours) instead of relative ones like "Top 10").

So I've changed my mind and I agree that it would be a bad idea indeed. Not because of the economical things, but because it could potentially lead to lack of creativity instead.

How about this: Write good tutorials and articles about the content creation to the Bohemia Wiki and get paid for that? I seriously hope that we would get a category for writing tutorials in the contest at least. I'd love to learn to script in Arma myself (and I'm not the only one at all for sure!), but the lack of tutorials, or at least guidance to eg. good books and other sources of information about programming in general makes it so time-consuming that it simply doesn't seem worth it to learn it. How much I'd love proper entry-level documentation about the content creation, especially scripting! :p

[vegeta897 13]

How about this: Write good tutorials and articles about the content creation to the Bohemia Wiki and get paid for that?

This, I like. It's more objective.