I mentioned this idea in a thread for a paid mod, and thought it'd be sensible to make a proper thread too. Anyhow, I think the devs should consider adding an official system/marketplace to handle paid mods, since they're a thing now, whether you like it or not. An official system would have various benefits: It would incentivise more people to make high quality content, give the devs a cut of the revenue, increase exposure for the mods (thus sales as well), and incentivise mod makers to keep their content up to date so that they don't vanish from the marketplace or so. Many complain that buying content from weird 3rd party sites feels dodgy, so it would also address that issue, especially if the system worked via the store through which the game was bought.
The way you have planned this sounds quite good, and it would encourage higher quality mods, I'll give you that, but I'm not sure if people would like the developers to start following in Bethesda's footsteps with a dedicated paid mod system. If decent free mods still exist in the future, then it should cancel out most problems with the system, as the repo would still be running alongside it. Who knows, the BeamNG team may be able to pull this off in the future, and there's no reason why this wouldn't work if executed properly.
The big difference here is that Bethesda wanted you to pay for mods that were previously free (afaik), while in BeamNG, paid mods already exist. In any case, paid mods would have to be content that is high-effort and about developer-quality. The reason why paid mods came about in the first place is because such content takes a crapton of work to create.
You have no idea how hard it is to reach the current developer quality, there are maybe 5 or less modders currently who can do it, I would argue that the bar shouldn't be set THAT high because very few people are universally skilled and talented in all the stuff that goes into making a mod. Maybe for now the bar could be the pre-remaster developer quality, something like the Piccolina which is already good in many aspects but compared to the current highest dev quality it's slowly starting to appear somewhat lacking, not enough to call it remaster worthy yet though. There should also be some clear hard rules to instantly disqualify lazy mods, such as: no console errors allowed, no warnings on default configs, no reusing models made by someone else excluding vanilla content if necessary, has to be a full car/map and not an addon for a vanilla car or prop, no overriding vanilla content, etc.
Lazy may not be the most accurate way to describe it but i agree. the difference between a basic "meshslap" to a near dev quality mod is potentially hundreds of hours. That skill, patience and effort should be rewarded. After all, theres a market for quality
Completely agree, I even think we need more paid mods There should also be a way to verify you own the mod so leaks are less likely.
