pc gaming
A young man playing computer games. Reuters/Stringer

The last week of April has been a period of great upheaval for gamers. The introduction of paid mods on Steam by Valve and Bethesda had gamers up in arms against the radical policy change. The issue was controversial enough to drive a rift within the gaming and modding community, with a majority of modders left feeling unappreciated. However, common sense prevailed and Valve acknowledged its mistake and announced the dismantling of the paid mods programme.

Now that the dust has settled, John Romero – the veritable progenitor of PC game development – has revealed that id software had originally considered the concept of paid mods way back in 1995. However, the means of implementation and intention behind the idea is quite different from Valve's idea of paid mods, according to PC Gamer.

Romero, who is best known for ushering the dawn of quality PC gaming through seminal id Software games such as "Wolfenstein 3D," "Doom" and "Quake," said that the original plan wasn't to profit from modding but to encourage it. Instead of making gamers pay for the mods, id Software intended to put money in the hands of modders through an ingenious means. The original goal was to create a modding portal dubbed id Net to encourage modders and use the proceeds from the endeavour to pay content creators.

"This company would be the portal that players would connect to and play other mod maker's creations," explained Romero in an interview with GI.biz "It was to be a curated site, levels and mods chosen by us at id, and if we put your content on our network we would pay you an amount equal to the traffic that your content drove to the site."

Romero believes that mod creators should be able to make money from their content. The id Net programme was intended to do just that by giving modders profits from the traffic generated by their content. The modding portal was envisioned to allow gamers to log in and roam through an interactive castle-like gallery of curated mods.

Romero and John Carmack at id Software have been known to be huge proponents of modding. The duo actively encouraged budding programmers and level designers to tinker around with their games. The lead programmer and technical mastermind Carmack had designed all id Software game engines to be modder friendly. The developer went to the extent of releasing SDK, essential tools and other modding essentials for the benefit of the modding community. The iconic videogame developer eventually even hired some of the best modders into their team, as detailed in an exhaustive Wired feature on the subject.

Unfortuntately, id Net concept was a herculean task that was too ambitious and time-consuming for the team to bring to fruition. The project was envisioned just as the team was developing "Quake," which was a radical and technically challenging project that called for a punishingly tough development schedule. That's why id Software decided to drop the modding programme to focus on the game at hand.

It's a pity that the original id Net plan never saw the light of the day. If it had, chances are that it would've led to higher quality mods. This could've been successful because, unlike Valve's arbitrary paid mods scheme, id Software's vision put the control in the hands of gamers by linking mod earnings to popularity. Moreover, Valve's paid mods policy was flawed because it expected gamers to cough up money and took a cut from the proceeds. Gamers saw this as unfair profiteering from the hard work of modders who brought more value to games.

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John Romero - Talks About Old Days (credit: rebelCoder)