Posted July 07, 2016
JMich: Not what Siannah said. The quote was "From a business standpoint, it's absolute stupendous idiocy to undertake something like this".
To put it another way, if you are about to quit your day job and do that kind of modding for a living, you will starve. If you do that kind of modding while you already have a job, then that's a very good thing to do. If you do decide to make such a project commercial, you do run into a big can of issues you can avoid by not going commercial.
Yes, their current work has attracted the attention of the professional industry, and it is quite possible that they will be contracted for future work.
Going a little bit off topic with this whole discussion, but I just wanted to chime in that during the whole paid mods thing the SureAI team themselves put out a statement that mods like Nehrim or Enderal simply wouldn't be commercially viable. This is because beyond just the modding team themselves, the projects also incorporate the work of numerous people outside the immediate team (other modders, composers, voice actors, etc). With a freely available mod all these people are willing to simply donate their work and time, but with a commercial project you actually have to consider the costs necessary to pay for all of this work, and the cost of the project begins to increase dramatically. To put it another way, if you are about to quit your day job and do that kind of modding for a living, you will starve. If you do that kind of modding while you already have a job, then that's a very good thing to do. If you do decide to make such a project commercial, you do run into a big can of issues you can avoid by not going commercial.
Yes, their current work has attracted the attention of the professional industry, and it is quite possible that they will be contracted for future work.
With any sort of paid content, when looking at commercialization one must consider the cost necessary to put something together vs the kind of price it can be sold for and what kind of sales can be expected. After experimenting with various balances, it seems from my perspective that the industry has mostly settled into two sweet spots- mini to full expansions (like the two Witcher 3 expansions) which tend to be sold for around $20-30, and very small, cosmetic additions which tend to be sold for $1-3. I'm guessing that things in the intermediate range tended to not sell enough (due to the higher price vs not enough content to interest many people), so ended up not being commercially viable.
My overall point, though, was that while modders creating something freely available simply out of their love for the game can surpass much of the paid DLC companies are putting out, there is a very different cost calculation when transitioning from something freely available to something that's going to be sold.