Should You Pay For Game Mods?

Game mods can be a fun feature to play with. They can change the difficulty of a game, provide new content to explore or simply make a game more fun and humorous.

While many mod creators share their creations for free, a lot of creators charge for them. This has its pros and cons for those that want to try out these mods. This post weighs up these pros and cons to help you decide whether you should be willing to pay for mods. 

Paid mods can be higher quality (and most likely won’t break the game)

Paid mods tend to be better quality, because the creator is more likely to face backlash if it causes issues for gamers. Free mods can sometimes be more of a risk. If it ends up screwing up your game and making it unplayable, you’ll have a harder time getting any financial compensation because you downloaded it for free. Those who charge for mods will generally only do so if they know that their mod is good quality. This is a big part of what makes paid GTA 5 modded accounts so attractive compared to modded accounts being given away for free.

Paying for mods is a good way to reward the creators

Some mods are not easy to design. For example, creating an entire new level in a game with new characters could take weeks or months. Paying money is a good way of rewarding creators for their efforts – and could even encourage them to develop mods or create new ones. Some creators set prices while others welcome donations. 

Paying for mods encourages a culture of charging for content

Modern games are more expensive than ever to buy. And a lot of them come with huge amounts of bonus content that is only accessible by paying for it. As a result, today’s gamers are spending increasing amounts of money per game compared to previous generations of gamers. Paying for mods essentially turns such services into another form of paid DLC. As an increasing amount of modders see the money that can be made from charging for mods, we could start to see charging for mods becoming the norm. This turns modding into less of a community and more of a marketplace that developers are likely to quickly take advantage of.

Free mods are less likely to be banned

Paid mods can be at greater risk of facing a copyright infringement lawsuit. This is because they are trying to make a profit using the intellectual property of others. This is particularly the case with mods that introduce characters from other fictional universes into games that do not have the rights to use those characters. Such mods are safer to distribute for free where they cannot be seen as financially exploiting a brand. This is something to consider when choosing whether to pay for mods. You don’t want to pay for a mod, only for it to be banned, as it then puts you at legal risk for continuing to use this mod.