Payware Mods are always a touchy subject, and today’s Reader Submission by Doug A. is going to address the topic head-on. However, despite payware mods gaining traction in modern sims like Assetto Corsa and rFactor 2, it’s incredibly strange to see them pop up in titles that are old enough to listen to American Idiot and get their first detention for mouthing off the teacher. Given that I don’t recall taking a public stance on payware mods, I guess now’s the time to address everything and get people pissed off at what I have to say.
Hey James. Yesterday, NR2003 track site Safer Barrier Project started requiring users to pay for access to the downloads, dubbing the new format “Premium Access.” It reminds me of quite a few years ago when some guy using the screen name }{udson introduced paid texture updates and the community went apeshit over it. I’m just curious about what you think about it. Jrock is a friend of mine so I’m not bashing him, I just don’t agree with the decision. To each their own, I guess. But since this hasn’t been seen in the NR2003 community in some time, it would be interesting to see how people feel about this now. Keep up the interesting posts on PRC.net, I enjoy reading the site.
There are two topics to address here, and both of them are equally retarded.
First, Payware Mods have no place in PC gaming because they can royally fuck shit up for the future. I don’t have a problem with people begging for donations on their mod page, because 3D modelling in 2015 is an extremely complex and lengthy process given the standards most gamers have become accustomed to with the current generation of hardware, but payware stuff has the potential to wreak havoc five years down the road, and that’s why I’m so against it.
Look, anytime you introduce a new concept into gaming, whether it be for the casual scrubs in Call of Duty, or for the hardcore no-fun-allowed Flight Simulator guys, you really need to sit down and brainstorm what the concept will look like five or ten years into the feature. To give an example, Downloadable Content wasn’t all that bad of an idea when it was introduced on Xbox Live. Once the game had run its course, you got a few new maps for Halo 2, or a few new tracks and cars for Project Gotham Racing 2, and it only cost you a couple bucks that you were most definitely going to spend on Doritos. Nobody envisioned a future where ten years later things like DLC Season Passes for Battlefield 4 would exist and cost as much as the whole fucking game. Nobody’s wallet was prepared for 1,000+ Rock Band songs or alternate liveries for planes in Ace Combat. And I’m sure nobody anticipated Forza Motorsport 4’s $300 worth of car packs and pre-order bonuses, along with the lite version where half of the fucking game was hidden behind more DLC if you didn’t buy the two disc version.
Or there was the first few years of Xbox Live Party Chat – what started as a great way to bullshit with your buddies from school while you were all playing different games completely eradicated all teamwork and public voice chat from competitive shooters, as everyone (and their little brother) retreated into their small group of friends residing in a private chat channel through the XMB Dashboard.
So when I see payware mods for rFactor 2 and Assetto Corsa, I don’t think “hey, that’s great, they did a really nice job and I don’t mind paying the $10”, I think about a future where payware mods are commonplace, and then think of how many great rFactor mods I’ve downloaded for free because that’s the way things are currently. Then, I do some really simple math and attach a monetary value to each mod and track – let’s say $10 for an individual RFM file and $5 per track because tracks are much easier to convert – and proceed to shit my pants.
No matter how you spin it, spending $385 on mods for a game that retails for $28 is absurd. And that’s using friendly numbers designed to intentionally keep the number for this hypothetical calculation below $500 so our older readers do not experience chest pains. If payware stuff becomes the norm, there aren’t exactly regulations for this shit to dictate a reasonable price, allowing mod teams to charge whatever they damn well please for a mod, which could easily lead to a Flight Simulator-like environment…Or even worse, Train Simulator… Most sim racers can’t deal with the astronomical costs of iRacing, which asks users to fork over a monthly subscription fee as well as $10 – $15 for each piece of content, and there are a constant stream of threads on r/iRacing demanding to know how to sign up for the game without breaking the bank. If you want to decrease the amount of people interested in sim racing altogether because only a fraction of people can afford to get started, then by all means go down the payware route. Just remember that you people can barely tolerate micro-transactions in games like R3E; this won’t be an improvement.
Now, onto how this applies to NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, and the Safer Barrier Project Premium Access feature.
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season has been abandonware for a few years now, and you can get it here. The game launched in February of 2003 and spawned a huge freeware modding community rivaled only by the likes of Quake 2 and Doom. For thirteen years, people were completely happy to just make shit for the game, free of charge. Those who attempted to tie a monetary value to their creations were essentially, as Doug A. put it in the submission, laughed out of the community.
Attempting to attach a monetary value to content that people have created and distributed for free over the course of a decade is single-handedly the stupidest fucking thing you could do at this exact moment. It’s no secret that NR2003’s community is a fraction of the size it once was, and of that fraction, there are some pretty dedicated nutters still roaming the forums. Making people pay for something they’d gotten for free throughout the game’s entire lifespan, when the size of the community is dwindling, is a fantastic way to encourage people to fuck off and never touch the game again.
Which is a shame, because NR2003 is quite good and actually superior to the massively multiplayer online game that followed, it just looks like dogshit because it was released when Windows XP was new and innovative.
Had we been paying for mods since Doom WAD’s were a thing in the 1990’s, okay, maybe I could justify a membership to some NR2003 add-on track site. But we haven’t. It’s also important to note that NR2003 doesn’t look the greatest compared to modern racing sims, so you’re not even paying for quality add-on tracks that totally change how the game looks; just configuration or texture updates. It’s pointless. Dumb. Asinine. SBP, what the fuck are you doing?
Are there going to be shitters in the comments section who claim “bro, it’s just ten dollars, get over yourself?”
Yes.
Will another site think “our tracks our better, we could sell a premium membership to our site for $20!”
Yes. And that’s where it begins.
Welcome to capitalism.