Starfield players pirate the DLSS mod after the developer locks it behind paywall

Just to clarify for everyone, only this clown's DLSS 3 mod (3 as in frame generation) is paywalld. His dlss 2 mod (2 as in normal dlss) is free on nexus.

Also to all the mental gymnasts trying to justify this horse shit, remember, the patreon sub is $5/MONTH. This means if you buy 1 month at $5 to download the mod, and the author "conveniently" comes out with an update one month later, you need to subscibe for another $5. So basically it's a fucking subscription for a god damn dlss 3 mod. You know the author is milking this bullshit to keep subscibers and keep his income flowing. Marty mcfly does the same fucking dogshit with his stupid ass RTGI reshade shaders. Fuck that shit. Those people can go get fucked.

I don't feel bad for anyone pushing a subscription model.
Does this type of mod break with updates, or could you potentially just stay on the version you downloaded and forego any updates? I don't mod much to the point where I've paid for any, but curious the requisite of ongoing subscription for this type of thing.
- It could. No way to tell for sure until it happens
- That's a good question. I'm not sure but I'd assume it would break with updates. I was thinking more about just updates the author makes to make the mod better. Likely he'll keep working on making it better but you can bet your booty thay he'll keep making minor updates once a month to milk his subsciber's money. Patreon is a fucking scam.
That McFly guy has been riding the "It'll be released soon™" train for something like five years at this point.
DLSS 3 is way better than 2, so I pirated the shit out of that mod. Frame Generation is a game changer. It's like a magic button that gives you an extra 30-60 FPS for free. Never understood the hate.
- DLSS 3 is far worse than DLSS 2 IMO.
  
  There's basically zero disadvantage to turning on DLSS 2. Most of the time you cannot or can barely tell the difference.
  
  DLSS 3 introduces lots of artifacting, some frames straight up look like DALL-E image, it adds input lag, and it needs you to already have a high framerate to start with to make it bearable, text in particular gets mangled by it.
  
  Fast paced games and games that rely on quick reactions are a no-go for DLSS 3. It's suitable for games like MS flight sim where adding input lag doesn't really matter and there's not rapid movement.
- Why do people hate on it? I thought ot was pretty clear that it's great. Unfortunately i can't use it since I have a 3080.
- Where would one pirate thie mod?
Personally I find it hard to care as I won't be playing the game for longer then a month anyhow. That said, real easy to wait for someone else to drop a dlss3 mod or just go without.
- Even easier to download the mod from someone else.
Okay but Martys RTGI is great and works in quite alot of games without much tinkering (just need to access depth buffer), don't mind paying for it. Useally sub and let it expire once every few years.
- “I don’t mind buying my own painting and then paying monthly for it to have some details filled in that eventually get painted over anyway at some rate”
  
  Is it morally wrong to have someone spy on the detail painter and copy their techniques? (In this metaphor techniques are DLSS implementation, not the paint (DLSS itself))

Suddenly paylocked mod gets pirated? Imagine my shock

It's like downloading Limewire Pro with Limewire, totally unexpected.
I wouldnt be surprised if his patreon gets hacked or at least a cease and desist.
What do you mean you don’t wanna pay for shit I didn’t pay for either, and do so on a monthly basis??

I should be allowed to freely profit off someone else’s work because I put some amount of personally chosen free time into my modifications and therefor should have power over the consumer and the original producer!!

Oink Oink!

Dude can charge whatever he wants, and you can choose to buy it or not. Super weird and annoying responses here.

Oh man, I saw a 2,000 word rant about it on Reddit. Just such whining

As if the dude would have bothered to do it for free? Likely not.

Pay, or don't, and then reevaluate all the things you do for free and if you have room to stand
It's a 1 time $5 fee. People are just mad that they're broke after buying a 4090. Frustrations should be aimed at Nvidia, not this one dude trying to make a buck
- People should eat less avocado toast.
- After a 4090 and A 57" Samsung G9, you couldn't afford a 5 dollar mod either!

Out of this whole thing, I just want to say something about this.

Some players' reactions to the paywall have been unfavorable; they think that charging for mods is unethical and goes against the spirit of community modification

Everyone needs to make bread. Someone asking for money from their mod or map or whatever isn’t against any spirit. It’s just a human being asking to make bread. Now some don’t agree with the price tag and that’s fine.

But we all need to recognize humans asking for some dough for their hard work is in the spirit of existing. Some folk do it for free just for the feelings and we love ‘em for it. But those asking for some cash are no different.

This world is already full of dog eat dog. Let’s not hate on someone just trying to get through it. You don’t have to pay the ask, but let’s not go making enemies just cause we don’t agree on that number on the price tag.

I am not disagreeing with the premise that it's fair for someone to be paid for their work. However, during the Skyrim paid mod controversy (on Steam), I learned that there a lot of situations where having paid mods did hurt the modding community and created ethical concerns.

Mods were being stolen and sold by people that were not the actual mod authors.

Mods were being sold that depended on larger, more complicated mods to function, but the payment was not shared with the larger mod.

Mods that had multiple contributors were being sold by an individual who was not sharing the money with the other contributors.

Players were concerned about being asked to pay for bug fix mods when the developer should be fixing their own game. This is of course, was not the modders fault and does not mean their bug fix mod wasn't valuable or deserving of pay, but many felt the developer should pay for it, not users.

I would also point out that it wasn't just greedy players that complained about paid mods - a lot of modders thought it went against the spirit of modding because of how it harmed collaboration in the community. Suddenly, they couldn't trust that others would not steal their work or profit from it unfairly. And, that seems like a reasonable take to me, given all the abuses that modders claimed happened in the short time that paid modding was a thing for Skyrim on Steam.
- It feels like the issue is that it was offering the convenience of payment to mods, but not really thinking about the necessary friction of assuring licenses/legality/etc. All of that CAN, of course, be an issue for cheap Unity games too. I remember back when Steam Greenlight started, they required each game to donate $100 to charity to even be considered, basically placing a bet of assurance that it wasn't a stolen asset flip (I don't know if they still do that).
You don't go into modding for the money. It's like making a non profit for the money. That's why they're getting backlash, they're asking money where money's not supposed to be involved.
- it's like theyre making a non profit for the money, except the without the making a non profit part
- This is such a shitty attitude 🤣
  
  God forbid we pay for a fucking cup of coffee because that person should want to work for free. This is the same bullshit as "work hard play hard" and "we are family here". Might as well start telling modders it's not about the pay, it's the people and experience we're paying you in. Rent what's that?
  
  You are all on a lemmy instance after 2 months of non stop removed about non paid reddit moderators. Make up your damn mind.
Remember, the patreon sub is $5/MONTH. This means if you buy 1 month at $5 to download the mod, and the author "conveniently" comes out with an update one month later, you need to subscibe for another $5. So basically it's a fucking subscription for a god damn dlss 3 mod. You know the author is milking this bullshit to keep subscibers and keep his income flowing. Marty mcfly does the same fucking dogshit with his stupid ass RTGI reshade shaders. Fuck that shit. Those people can go get fucked.

If you want to charge $5 or $10 for your time spent making the mod, fine, whatever. But if you are trying to make it a subscription model then I have ZERO sympathy for you.
- Ultimately, the guy is being upfront with his pricing and what he's asking for. What's the reason to hate on him? Either it's worth it at that price or it's not.
The reason why he charges does not matter at all. Anyone wanting a service for free is not in the position to demand anything. Would it be nice to get stuff for free? Sure! But demanding free service and badmouthing if you don't get it? Fuck off.
The game has just launched and the mod had been released and cracked already. This isn't about making bread, it's clearly a trivial hack for him to do, not something that requires full time job maintenence.

People spend hundreds of hours modding free of charge, what he does is a joke in comparison if we are talking about lost time that could have been spent earning money. The groundwork was made by Bethesda, AMD and Nvidia.
For real. You want it for free? Cool go ahead and make the mod yourself. All the tools are there. Wait, you don't want to spend your time learning to code? You don't want to spend your time learning modding tools. Our time is our most finite resource and you get mad when someone asks for something in return for theirs? People are just up their own asses.

The modder also locked the DLSS3 mod behind a paywall, and players also pirated that 🤣

No, DLSS3 was the only one he wanted $5 for.

This reminds me of the McFly ray tracing plugin for ReShade - turns out somebody else has already made an open-source alternative

Marty McFly is a fucking tool for paywalling his mediocre shaders.
- Well he managed to snag a sponsorship from Nvidia thanks to his shenanigans. Which probably says more about Nvidia than about the guy, to be honest.

Piracy is always ethical

So the mod creator deserves nothing for their time and work?

I don't have a problem with some mods being sold. My issue is when you price it initially for free and THEN decide later to charge money for it. That's within your rights of course, but don't expect people to not get pissed off enough to pirate it.

Okay is gamescensor written by actual people, or just some generative learning SEO site? Because wow this is a mess of an article.

The mod replaces the FSR2 upscaling technology included in the game (which is made for AMD graphics cards)

FSR2 works on every major graphics card

a more modern upscaler that is compatible with more recent Nvidia cards.

Wat?

PureDark, who claimed to make more than $40,000

Nope some one else extrapolated that data from a patreon page.

It may be because AMD is "Starfield's exclusive PC partner" and only supports FSR2 technology at launch that the game only does so.

Wat again?!?

I understand when massive, dlc sized mods are monetized. Not when small ones are.

For example in minecraft, there was a mod with which you could pregenerate your world before making it. The creator decided to gut it and put all the good features behind his patreon.

I mean at the end of the day its the decision of the developer who put time in it.. if you're not happy with that look for another mod or code your own.
Sure I appreciate free mods but we shouldn't take them for granted.
God forbid someone make money from the things they put time into!

ITT: A gross misunderstanding about how mod and DLSS/RTX licencing works.

Folks act like modding is a constitutional right and not expressly allowed within TOS. Guys of Bethesda wanted to go full on piss on the community they could shut all of it MPAA style. They choose to let modders use and monitize their assets because it's less expensive and harmful then attacking everyone e.g Nintendo. https://documents.bethesda.net/en/terms-of-service

RTX is fully redistributable without modification as long as it's used on Nvidia hardware.

https://developer.nvidia.com/downloads/nvidia-rtx-sdks-license-23jan2023pdf#:~:text=Further%2C the DLSS SDK and,DLSS SDK and NGX SDK.

They choose to do that because the community caries their games. I wouldn't own a single beth game if they didn't have mod support.
- And? I'm just informing everyone removed about the legal issues who lack a fundamental understanding of the aforementioned documents.
ITT: removed “the old ways were better” user clearly doesn’t understand the hipocricy of charging for mods when devs didn’t pay for access themselves.

What you get to be the only person who profits? Not the companies who made the rest of the fucking game so you can copy and paste some fucking stackoverflow implementation posts?

Dev needs to get real - enjoy that bite in your ass. Fees for thee but not for me
- Wat?

This isn’t anything new, there’s some community software locked behind paywalls like patreon already. Doesn’t mean we have to like it though.

Then again, DLSS is an nvidia product, so there’s a legal issue here I think.

DLSS is free to redistribute. https://developer.nvidia.com/downloads/nvidia-rtx-sdks-license-23jan2023pdf#:~:text=Further%2C the DLSS SDK and,DLSS SDK and NGX SDK.

Unless they go crazy like oracle/Java devs are encouraged to use it.
Nah it’s free to use tech, but yes the dev is indeed still charging for something that they themselves could have to pay for but don’t.

Only the mod dev gets to make money, not any of the hundreds of people (if not more) working on the base game.

Come on man it’s fine, charge the little guy, big guy make more money. It’s simple /s

Lazy game devs should release finished optimized products.

How to say you know nothing about game development without saying you know nothing about game (software) development. But want to assert your opinion on it regardless.

It's corporate profiteering not lazy devs. The devs work their asses off, these aren't their decisions to make.

It's like blaming the guy finishing the drywall for design problems with the building. Lazy drywallers, ruining a good office tower, it wouldn't be leaning if they weren't so lazy.
- The more people defend the lazy game devs, the more crappy half finished games we will get. The reason people need to seek out upscaling at all for Starfield is because the game isn't optimized. Lazy design.

Imagine putting a mod that the devs of the game it's for can take down at any moment if they feel like it.

Imagine being dumb enough to pay for it as well!

PureDark, who claimed to make more than $40,000 per month from locking DLSS3 mods behind their Patreon page,

Make that 50k, his current patreon page shows over 10k members. There's stuff for several games there, tho, like RDR2, Last of Us 2, Elden Ring, Fallout 4, etc.

Seems there's plenty of space for competitors to enter the "offer DLSS mods for games that don't have it"

If I was earning that much per month, I wouldn't worry about taking extra time to add DRM to my stuff. Despite the cracked version floating around, he got more subscribers since the first stories came around and he's at zero risk of suffering any significant loss. Pirate that shit with a clean conscience

Just use one of the 6 other DLSS bridge mods kekw.

Puredarks mods been working since day 1 for me. No issues, even with reshade.

PureDark is the modder they're referring to. The DLSS 2 version of their mod is free, the DLSS 3 version is not.
- Ah fair enough, for some reason i read a different mod submitters name. Ty for the clarification!

... supports DLSS3, a more modern upscaler that is compatible with more recent Nvidia cards.

Gotta love errors in tech articles.

Pardon my ignorance, but what's the error?
Blame Nvidia for their purposefully misleading marketing.
Well that's a tad pedantic. Effectively, if not technically, interpolation is upscaling.
Thats more due to Nvidia making both Frame Generation, Upscaling and the original use, Anti Aliasing (the SS in DLSS is super sampling) the same term.

Realistically, DLSS should be referred to as an anti aliasing technique(like TAA is) but it was basically colloquially hijacked to turn into an upscaling tech.
- Nvidia already brands the AA different. DLAA is anti-aliasing without upscaling. DLSS is upscaling, AA, frame-generation, and soon also RT denoising.
Thats more due to Nvidia making both Frame Generation, Upscaling and the original use, Anti Aliasing (the SS in DLSS is super sampling) the same term.

Realistically, DLSS should be referred to as an anti aliasing technique(like TAA is) but it was basically colloquially hijacked to turn into an upscaling tech.

Sure modders can put stuff behind paywalls, but implementing DRM, is overkill. And it would be nice if they release month old versions for free afterwards.. sSo I have to see, Starfield isn't that old yet.

BTW, I am not really getting the FSR/DLSS situation.

Shouldn't FSR2 be working on Nvidia gpus as well and is open source? DLSS is propritary and only works on Nvidia.

So I am not really understanding the issue here, other than customers of Nvidia not having FSR2 because Nvidia hasn't implemented the open standard, right? So they should complain to them about it.

IMO this is a bit like the fediverse vs. other social media topic, so I would complain about people creating their own propritary stuff, that is intentionally incompatible with the fediverse, and not about people that use the fediverse API in their app, but not support some propritary API.

FSR2 looks like dogshit. DLSS is much better. That's why.
I think the mod is simply a better implementation of DLSS and one that possibly even works on non-nvidia or non-dlss supported GPUs. IDK, I saw it the other day on Nexus but didn't get it because FSR works just fine 🤷🏻‍♂️
- Most people think DLSS is a better upscaler than FSR so that's why people wanted DLSS support, but it only works on Nvidia RTX GPUs, while FSR will work on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Downside is FSR apparently isn't as good as DLSS but I can't confirm that as I have an AMD GPU.
- What are you talking about? The mod adds dlss frame generation into the game, which only runs on nvidia 40xx gpus.

I think the Nms skins are looking great

The year is 2023. Gamers are expected to pay for the ability to utilize a feature built into their videocard. A true dystopia.

Called it! 😱🤣🤘🏼

Man, and I was just about to get that mod too. Really scummy.

No, it's always been behind a paywall. There's one by a different modder that isn't: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/761
- How has anyone's experience been with this? I haven't installed it yet.
Is it? Didn't someone put effort into this?
- For sure, but like most every other mod for any game out there, there's donation pages and Patreons. What if you buy it and download it, and it turns out it doesn't work for you? You can't refund it like you would a Steam game. Locking mods, an already experimental thing, behind a paywall is scummy, because you're not only profiting off of someone else's game, you're also taking money from people who aren't even sure it's right for them. There are tons of mods out there that are not paywalled and are comfortably financially supported through Patreon. Using a paywall in this situation is just a cash grab banking on a freshly released game. Literally the day after.

God forbid you pay an individual for writing the code. Turns out y'all just like freeloading and it has nothing to do with publishers.

I'd agree with you if this was the full game but it's a mod. I think it's ridiculous to ask for money for a mod with a couple of exceptions:

You took a commission from someone who wanted something specific

you are making a whole new game like Skyblivion

it is going to be packaged up and resold by someone else like Bethesda selling a new version of skyrim
- That's a really long way to say you want free labor. That work is time. They developed those expertise. If you want it free, go ahead and do it yourself or hope some one will volunteer their time. It's $5 for fucks sake and most of the software will be pirated anyways.
  
  Getting pissed or calling it 'just a mod ' is irrelevant.
Oh but the mod creator gets to freely profit off someone else’s game and someone else’s algorithms/techniques.

Cry me a river, you’re either with the rest of the community in enjoying modifying the things we own and sharing those changes with each other or you aren’t. You want paid material, go make your own shit but don’t try to undercut and slime your way into our community. We like doing the things we do the way we do it.

capitalism is for pigs
- Lololol so because some people volunteer their time everyone should perpetually.
  
  If you don't want to pay go volunteer your own personal time instead of making excuses how mod devs shouldn't have the option to monitize where contractually available. But your won't because it requires years of developing skills and time to implement and that's a lot harder than removed on the Internet about how some guy had the audacity to ask for pay.
  
  The entitlement is hilarious.