John Romero reveals some of id Software's scrapped plans

May 5, 2015 11:10 GMT  ·  By

The famed creator of Doom and Quake, history-making first-person shooters from back in the day, John Romero, decided to add his own two cents to the huge paid mods debate started by Valve and Bethesda.

Valve briefly introduced the option for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim content creators to charge for their (sometimes) hard work on the Steam Workshop, letting them sell their creations with a three-way split between the parties involved.

Bethesda, the developer of TESV: Skyrim, took a lot of flak for the move, and the decision was reversed in less than a week, due to the community's outrage. Many considered that the main problem with the entire initiative was the "let users sort it out" policy that governed the entire thing, especially since many of the mods actually fixed the numerous leaks the game originally had.

However, it seems that this isn't by far the first time a video game developer is considering letting community members who create extra content for its titles profit from their work.

id Net could have made things entirely different for mod-makers

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry, John Romero revealed that id Software actually intended to pay mod makers for their effort in the mid-90's.

He went on to explain that the company had planned to create id Net, a portal that players could connect to in order to find other mod makers' creations and play them. The project was supposed to have curation, with levels and mods chosen by id Software employees, and with a system that paid content makers in relation to the amount of traffic to the site their mods would create.

The idea was ultimately dropped due to the difficult development schedule that Quake had, but Romero still thinks that modders should be rewarded for their work, because that's exactly how things work in game companies, and outsiders should benefit from the same treatment.

Granted, back in those times, many mods used to be full-fledged games, until the extra content business model turned them into a handful of official skins, missions, multiplayer maps, and other such items that many people consider should be in the base game to begin with.