Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest mod team now has hundreds of devs working on its huge custom campaign in an impressively professional production

Does anyone get paid anything? Or potentially just the game makers capitalising on the success of the mod?
- bethesda taught us a very important lesson a while ago - if your game isn't good, then the modders won't bother. Skyrim despite its flaws is a good game, and has mods to show for it, Starfield despite its budget is pretty bad, and after the initial hype most ambitious mod projects were cancelled.
  because of that i don't think there's any neferious plot behind the game makers celebrating their modding community, and the modding community certainly isn't getting forced to work without pay - they're passionate about the game and want to make something of their own within it, and honestly that builds a good portfolio for future use too
- People get mad when payment is expected for labor
  
  Defending amateurism in amateur fields is reasonable. Especially when amateurism is a legal defense of the practice such as modding. Professional mods without official license are copyright violations.
  This is similar to fanfic communities. The amateurism of the field gives it part of its charm and community, and it also makes it easier for people to come in, develop these skills, and move into creating and selling original works if they'd like to move in that direction.

I don't get ballooning mod teams. I mean, at that point why not ship a standalone game? Last time this happened it was called The Witcher and I hear that did alright.
- Last time a ballooning mod team released a mod was Fallout: London and that also did alright...
- Modding something that already exists is way easier than making a game, and when it comes to huge mod teams most people contribute in small ways in their free time. People also come and go to the modding scene whenever they feel like it as opposed to actually requiring to work in a timely manner.
  
  Yeah, well, that's why game engines are a thing. I didn't pick The Witcher at random, that was built on top of Neverwinter Nights tech.
  Maybe I'm too stuck in the 90s, but I never quite got the point of doing all those total conversions for Quake games when you could just as well use the exact same tools by licensing the engine and just ship the thing as a game.
  Well, no, I'm lying. The point of those total conversions was very often that people wanted to use a bunch of licensed characters they didn't own, which I guess is the point here as well, so maybe I've answered my own question.
- They do eventually that's how we got most of our legendary studios and genres, but modding is low risk and cuts a lot faff. It also gives you a massive boost in publicity without spending on marketing.
  
  Sure.
  Again, people seem to be reading this as saying "don't mod, develop full games". Not what it says. I'm saying "if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead".
  In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it's worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don't like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.
- why not ship a standalone game?
  Hasbro owns the ip and it's way cheaper to use someone else's license and make changes than to get your own license.
- A friend of mine had a similar thought. He was sitting down to do some work on an open source game, and then was like "Wait. What am I doing?" and he made his own game from scratch. ( This one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1271280/Rift_Wizard/ - It's good, but kind of too hard for my brain )
  It helped that he a had a lot of xp in game development. I imagine some of the boring, difficult, stuff doesn't have as many people readily available. There's a lot of "Why does the game crash if I push the up arrow key when I'm in my inventory, sometimes?" stuff you have to worry about when you're doing the whole thing.
  
  Rift Wizard!
  Part of me is so pulled by games with customizable characters and good magic systems, but roguelike… oof. But it calls to my childhood self. Maybe I'll watch a playthrough to try to see if it's for me.
  Props to your friend for making and finishing a game at all, let alone the reviews said one lots of people enjoy!
- I've never heard that this started as a mod. Last I knew, even Witcher 1 was a licensed product even at the initial development. It's been a couple years since I watched the CDProjekt documentary though.
  
  It didn't, technically, but it WAS originally build on the Neverwinter Nights toolset/engine. A licenced version, then modified. Which is sort of my point. Why mod if you have a big group of devs and you're working at speed? Just pay to license the toolset you're using and ship a game.