In an interview with IGN, Starfield DLSS modder PureDark defends the decision to put his advanced DLSS mods on Patreon, and he plants his flag in the debate over paid mods.
Sorry, I dont mean to laugh, but where have you been?
The bulk of gamers only care about their instant gratification. If they actually were capable of taking a stand then there'd be a lot less awful companies pulling in billion dollar+ game releases.
I have no problem with someone getting paid for their work. In fact, I encourage people to get paid for their work.
But if you decide to sabotage your own product for the sake of attacking people who refuse to pay for it, you just make your product worse for everyone who did pay for it and you do nothing to actually solve the piracy issue. In that case, you're reaping what you sow.
That's hilarious. I can't believe someone would openly admit to putting malware in a paid mod, I'm surprised anyone actually bought it in the first place.
So someone will take his mods and make actual pirate versions of them. If he's trying to Streisand it, couldn't have done a better job. I don't see it being very profitable, though...
The moment you release a mod for free you list all privilege of making a paywall cause people will try even harder to get it for free than if it where paid to begin with
What a imputent salty child, "hidden mines" my butt, they gonna be removed by the couple of people still using htwir mods in 5 nanoseconds after release
I understand he's mad that he's losing money of a thing he made but, I think he's going about that the wrong way. I would see that as more of a challenge then a "wow I shouldn't do this", I expect any person doing stuff like this would look at it the same way, free cracks and exploits are rarely about the money, it's generally about the challenge of doing something that isn't supposed to be allowed. Adding "mines" to try and sabotage it I believe will just make someone more apt to try and crack it.
In Mirror's Edge one of the jumps near the end of the game was programmed to be actually undoable. It slowed you down, just a little bit, so it was now impossible to complete the game.
Paying customers are footing the bill for that anti-theft
The guy is making over $500k off someone else's product with a couple days' work. I'm no Tankie, but you don't have to be a high schooler or a pothead to have a problem with capitalism's more toxic extremes. People have been conditioned to forget this, but piracy is a counter-leverage to prevent product pricing from going out of control. Just look at the average prices of Switch games vs PC games. The harder it is to pirate a product, the further the price of that product is from a value consensus.
These types of anti-thefts tend to false-fire for the paying customers (who footed the bill). This is especially true because he builds his mods against a closed-source product that behaves in ways he cannot always predict. Published modding interfaces are never perfect.
The real value of the "product" was done by (m/b)illion dollar investments by Nvidia and game companies facilitating support for FSR or alternate upscalers. His "product" takes a few days to implement and others are able to offer the same "product" for free.
He is making a ridiculous amount of money considering the amount of work required and feels like an insult to modders who actually spend hundreds of hours tinkering and publishing their work for free. He already makes more than he deserves on patreon, why is he so sensitive about others pirating it.