Aeropause: Get paid for your content

With all the talk about user-created content on the next gen consoles, there is one subject that doesn't really come up: Will we get paid for it? Aeropause brings up this very question and points to the PC as an example of what is already done.

Console manufacturers aren't planning online repositories of user-made material just because they're nice; they want to get paid. Since we know businesses are only out for the money (duh), we need to know how much of that $2.50 mod we made is going to net us. Will we get paid per download? Will we get a flat fee? Will the publisher call intellectual property and pay us nothing? In any case, Aeropause says we should expect some compensation for content made; don't let it be free ... ever.

But the PC community has been giving away free content for years. Even Aeropause mentions that some free mods -- like Counter-Strike -- made it big, but they say we shouldn't be giving anything away. We contend we should stick with the PC model. True, most user mods are junk -- such as the bazillion player houses in Oblivion -- but requiring us to pay for all of them won't make things better; in fact, they'd get worse. The junk won't go away. Instead, we won't find out the mod is garbage until after we've spent our (or mommy and daddy's) hard-earned money. Leave the payments to full XNA games.