@lilhasselhoffer actually yours is stupid.
1. IP argument is especially dumb you expect Bethesda to sue itself? A mod team up with a Developer is not related to IP protections. At no point is anyone unsure of what the mod is or where it came from.
2. Valve did no work? how old are you? Were you even gaming when counter strike was a mod? all you seem to remember is the past 2 years.
3."will not continue"
has been for several decades. Morrowind is 13 years old there are still mods being made for it.
Neverwinter nights is just as old. Still mods being made for it as well as the most successful Kingmaker which was spun off into an expansion.
There is no "new modding movement" and no Bethesda didn't wake up yesterday and say "hey you know what I realized? there's a lucrative oppurtunity in mods." They realized that more than a decade ago. They didn't eliminate mods then and they won't now. All the mods turned games increased the community as more and more tried to duplicate the success. After all if you watched that guy get his name all over tech sites, get a nice paid position with a dev, and a decent salary; wouldn't you want to be just like that?
Whatever changes happen will continue to follow the same recipe for success.
at any rate your posts get longer and longer as you continue down a terrible argument. It's a "spray and pray" of forum trolling. You slather together a ton of random unrelated arguments hoping somehow to make yourself look a genius and the one arguing look an idiot.
So welcome to ignore.
You are...frustrating. When confronted with an argument you attack the person making it, which doesn't prop up your own argument.
You're unlikely to see this, but being called a troll really pisses me off. To answer your innanity, let's take a real test case. You've provided 4 examples where a complex mod got a team of people hired as contractors for a bigger company. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, and increase that quantity from 4 to 20. That should reasonably cover reality, with a margin of error for unknown games, lesser known games, and the like. You cite back to the early 2000's, but let's again give you the benefit of the doubt and only consider this something from 2006 (when Oblivion launched). I've been rather generous here, but the take away is that in 9 years you've got 20 modders/modding groups which have experienced success, the likes of which have actually gotten them a job.
What kind of a success rate is that? Let's gauge it off of one uniform source, because that's the best way any metric can be generated. The Nexus is a hub for Bethesda game related mods. In the period between 2006 and 2015 we've had 4 releases (Oblivion, Fallout 2, New Vegas, and Skyrim). Those 4 releases have 27,833, 14,058, 16,453, and 43,553 files respectively. Let's quarter than number for revisions, and further drop a zero to cover the 90% of mods that take 30 minutes to write. That's 101,897/4/10 = 2548 mods that are reasonably complex that are available on the Nexus. Now this is only 4 games, and only from Bethesda (yes Obsidian did NV, but please accept the generalization). Nothing from Valve at all. If those 20 successes were culled from 2548 mods then the success rate is 0.78%. Saying that "most" modders get support from publishers for their work is crap. 0.78% is a statistical anomaly, not "most."
You seem to not get the whole IP thing. Let me reiterate the explanation for children. If Billy makes a character or setting that is unique, not based upon or derived from any other work, he can copyright that character or setting. Examples of this are the Marvel Universe (now property of Disney), the Elder Scrolls universe, and Google. Now, to maintain the legal protection of that intellectual property, Billy must make sure that nobody else uses his character, without obtaining permission from him. The government supports its creators by allowing them a monopoly on their creations. If Billy was to learn that Sally, Juan, and Fred all wrote about his character he'd need to have them destroy all of their work to protect his intellectual property. If Billy didn't the case could be made that his IP was not being defended, and therefore his character could be used freely. This is how we get things like the Little Mermaid, which anybody can make a version of; but this is also why we have things only one entity can make versions of, like Spiderman.
That may be patronizing, but if the point is still lost tell me who QCs mods? Where is the legal department that makes sure somebody gets sued when some joker mods dragons in Skyrim to look like Thomas the Tank Engine? What about the Nintendo people suing because somebody modded a Mario style world into Unreal Tournament? If you can't answer these questions, don't bother to try. The reason this doesn't get ugly very quickly is because the modding community accepts little or no cash for their work, and they aren't big punching bags of money. The counter argument is why Notch was pursued by Zenimax for his Scrolls game. Notch has money, so having a similar enough name could degrade the brand and make the IP protections vanish. The modding community therefore exists in a gray legal area; they are protected by not having money change hands, but conversely can't make a living out of it.
What happens then, when paid mods appear? Suddenly there's got to be enough legal red tape to cover Valve, Bethesda, and the modders. Valve, by nature, can claim users are responsible for content. Any money they receive is related to making their platform run, and not an endorsement of the content. This means either Bethesda or the modders can be pursued by people who have their IP infringed upon. Think this won't happen; it already is. In order to deal with the DMCA youtube implemented a copyright scheme that allows anybody to claim their IP is infringed upon, take money while the debate is occurring, and whenever their claims are dismissed doesn't even slap them on the wrist. That's only for including parts of their content, not potentially portraying their IP in a damaging light. That sort of crap isn't just going to get people to lose monetization, they'll be suing modders left and right for several times what their mod could potentially be making. With that money flowing back, in most part, to Bethesda who would you sue?
The modding community, by and large, realizes this. We're allowed to do whatever we wish, just as long as we don't rock the boat. Once Bethesda, or anyone else implements a system where modders can be paid we lose our current equilibrium. The optimists say that mods will get better, because the authors can do it as a job. The pessimists say that a flood of crappy mods will make modding useless, and create enough legal issues that anybody producing a game will simply kill modding to end the nightmare. Unfortunately, reality sides with the pessimists. The Android market is a clone farm for whatever game is popular. Apple has the same issue. Steam has experienced more than enough Unity related shenanigans to call it an objective failure. This isn't going to be a renaissance for modders, it will the the death knell for games that support mods. Unsurprisingly, the legal system will quite easily murder fun, to protect the IP rights of those who can sustain legal battles.
Because you continue to miss the blatantly obvious, I will state this one last time. Valve owns the IP for Team Fortress, DoTA, Counter Strike, etc... This is not an accident, not a coincidence, and should be a giant red flag. Modders took the engine from one game, and built an entirely new game on it. Once the idea took root, Valve swooped in and bought up the IP. To not appear as EA does, they offered jobs to the people who pioneered the IP. This isn't benevolence, it's hiding the iron fist in a velvet glove. Valve owns these IPs. Just like with Steam, they've found being the marketplace is more profitable and less stressful than making new games. They still hold all the strings, they just choose not to be EA, and allow their puppets to make games well rather than quickly and cheaply. If you saw a companion cube plush for sale, that's Valve printing money. If you've ever bought a digital hat, that's Valve making money. They could theoretically never release another game (and they're really trying with HL2: episode 3), farm out development to other studios, and continue to print money. That is the power of IP. Even the most successful games make chump change next to the value of the IP they build.
Edit:
My posts get longer, because you continue to demonstrate a lack of basic understanding. It's great to say "every game should have mods," but it's entirely another to make that happen. It's not about paying for the mods, it's about the taint of money turning something fun into a zoo for lawyers.
I'm happy to pay out for a good product. Patreon and Kickstarter allow exactly that sort of thing to happen. Creative individuals get paid to do what they love. Unfortunately, I've yet to meet an application store that isn't more interested in the bottom line than the ability to express creative freedom.
Edit:
Minor changes to spelling. Gotta type in anger less often.
