Since paywaller bullshit is rearing its head again:
'What about my relative who works in game dev?'
Game dev is a career in a team of people with different roles. It's the kind of job with bosses and SOME level of quality control, even if big companies keep trying to fire theirs. Generally speaking, there's at least some level of in-house quality control in a job from a higher-up of some kind. There will be someone there IDEALLY making sure things go smoothly.
And sometimes they don't.
Sometimes, either the devs or those responsible for the quality don't deliver and the finished product is a load of soggy dogshit. We are SIMS PLAYERS, a lot of us play THE SIMS 4, where we constantly talk about how no-one should pay over 1k for a broken-to-shit game. Where a lot of people don't - and good on them.
So why do you think people want to pay for poorly-made custom content - where there is little unified expectation of quality? Where people think they deserve to paid up to $10 a month when they don't even know how to Decimate a fucking mesh?
The bullshit 'get a job / real job' argument
I don't buy into 'real job' bullshit.
I don't tell CC creators to 'get a job' because it reeks of classism and as a customer service worker, who is sick of seeing office workers and their weird little power fantasies and other workers talk about 'big girl jobs' and 'big boy jobs' and acting like my job 'isn't real' when they rely on it for their shopping and satisying their power fantasies, I'm sick of hearing it. Yes, even against bad CC creators. The 'Get a job' part is NOT IMPORTANT IN THE SLIGHTEST. My job is not more real than someone trying to earn money in ways that aren't a standard job.
Someone not having a typically 'standard' way of making money IS NEVER THE ISSUE! It's all about the attitude to the paid craft, which more often than not, sucks ass.
People will try to charge you for literally anything
People will use other people's artwork in their paid CC (that is not under a license that allows commerical use) and expect you to pay for it. They will try and charge you for meshes converted from other games. They will try to charge you for SIMS, for fuck's sake. Remember that person selling printable Sims cheats sheets for £2.50? I think people would be ultimately less bothered if people were only charging you for stuff they actually made, and that only used assets that they were actually allowed to charge for.
If there were a level of quality control, people would be more eager to support creators. People WANT to support others, they just don't want to support people with bad practice.
Back when Yoonie was still around, (if you're going to mention him for the love of the Watcher use he/they pronouns b/c I'm sick of people 'she' -ing him when it's right in his fucking bio) he brought up the bigger issue being lack of quality control and unified rules,
We were considerably less angry during the period when MOST people abided by the Early Access period of 1-2 weeks and charged less than $5 a month. I used to Early Access sub to a posemaker who ALWAYS made good poses, $1 a month, 1-2 weeks Early Access before they deleted their patreon. Back when I could afford it, I made a donation-sub of £5 each month to Herecirmsims, one of my most relied-upon posemakers with good quality poses and a great personality to match. I have donated to multiple creators' Ko-Fi's.
I have a $1 PLACEHOLDER tier for 1 person, my CC will always be free but I needed a tier to be able to make a Patreon. Whilst my payout thing is ALWAYS frozen, someone still donated to the 1-person 1 dollar tier because they wanted to support me.
A lot of free creators have Ko-Fi's, and a lot of them DO get donations because a lot of us who CAN support DO want to. We support free creators BECAUSE they are putting passion first, many of them are very good at what they do and are lovely people. They could've forced us to pay up, and they didn't.
then EA scrapped the Early Access model (which fucked things up even more, beccause then you were seeing Early Access periods of 3-7 months) and EA started putting permapaywall creators which bad working practices on a pedestal (and, well, now we see why, with the release of the Marketplace.)
We've all seen those people who come out of absolutely NOWHERE already with Patreons already on the go, and some of whom clearly have no idea what they're doing from both an essentially-small-business or quality control standard. And now we're seeing AI seep into CC creation, and nobody wants to pay for something technically no-one made.
It's the same with ANY artist. People don't want to monetarily support artists with bad working practices, and CC creation is no different. When I did VERY cheap art commissions, people got constant WIPs, I used references to ensure as accurate animal anatomy as I could manage. People often came to me if they had non-canine, non-feline characters knowing I'd use references to make their non-canines, non-felines not end up looking like cats or dogs. I made sure that I could do all I could manage to make something the customer would like.
As a side note - You are never going to be able to do anything about file sharing or piracy
Not meant in a doomerist way, either. This isn't a bad thing, especially not in regards to Sims custom content.
Not everyone has the disposable income to support creators - not because they're big meanies, but because they can't afford it. And I'm not just talking about American, British and Europeans here - I'm taking about many countries in the global South, where they may not make anywhere NEAR the same amount of monthly income as other countries. Even on minimum wage, I earn, in terms of money conversion comparison, almost ten times more than my Egyptian friend does. I mention this because it's entwined with gaming in general a fair bit - some countries charge ridiculous amounts for games.
Anything a creator does to try and hyper-guard their shit will eventually be circumvented, and that's okay. People are ALWAYS going to pirate, especially in countries where it's moreso the norm due to high taxes, other high costs, or things just not being released in the country so you have to pirate.
Honestly, people pirating custom content is free advertisement. Paywalling and Early Access creators are ALWAYS the ones where people use their CC, tag them, and gush about how good the CC is. They get WAY more advertisement and praise than ANY free CC creator bar, like, two of the bigger CC creators. Free CC creators get shit compared to the people who charge, so acting like Simmers don't care about paid creators is ultimately stupid.
Like I said - it's basically free advertisement, and then people who can afford to pay that creator will. Some of these creators are making the equivalent of up to £16k a month, they are not going to lose liveable income because people downloaded it off of DHM instead. That's more than I earn in a year, in a month.
We don't want this bullshit we've been dealing with for years to end up in Paralives, because most of the people who charge have no idea how to act from a small business perspective. And we want peace for these indie game devs!
Most other modding communities would chase people trying to monetise mods out of the door. Skyrim modders spend months and months working on some mods and they still end up being free because they do it for the love of the game. I've been replaying Dragon Age, and not ONE of the mods I have used has ever been chargeable. They're all free on Nexus. Because they love the game and the playerbase. No paywalls, no AdFly, just downloads!
We don't want other games ruined by Sims modding community bullshit - especially not a brand-new indie game being bombarded by Mr. Krabs types within five days of its release.
