Wed Mar 27, 2013 11:15 pm
@Gamerphate, If you make a mod you own it unless you have some other agreement(s) that counters that.
Ok let me rephrase that. Yes, you can take credit saying "I made this mod", but you are under no legal position to sell the mod in any form or manner, technically it is a mod for a game not written by you, so therefore you technically do not own the mod.
I say all this cause I worked as part of the beta team for Chernarus Life (the ORIGINAL not the existing knock off version that still exists..more on that in a minute). These guys moded ARMA 2 to include stats not normally in the game, this has been done before. What they did do that was new was that they found a way to have a STATIC server for data, and this means that, the next day after the server resets, GASP, all your stats are still saved! Whereas the current one that still exists (known as the stolen code..more on this shortly as well) does NOT save your stats, and as soon as the server resets it is just a new game and EVERYONE is a noob again, so there was no MMO level of gameplay but more like a FPS.
Now, what happened with them was that they had one server, and it was in Germany, and there were people ALL over the world beta testing. The core problem was when Aussies would try to connect, because they would cause severe packet ping, throwing the latency into the multiple of hundreds, thus overloading the server, and then it would reset. Now, all the saved stats would load, however, if at that time you had things on you, or new stats and had not stopped by the bank to save your stuff, you were S.O.L. and just lost an hour or two of gameplay (PRETTY ANNOYING). So, they ended up offering others the ability to use the code and host their own server. The SECOND this happened, some kid just tore the code apart, put his name on it, and removed all the server code (which obviously he had no way of implementing). And this caused a huge rift in the community, and the original mod devs decided to just abandon the project we had all been working so hard to make happen.
Now I had to say all that above to get to my point here. They made a mod for ARMA 2, it was great, people liked it, they had costs spent developing the mod, and monthly server costs. However, they did not own ARMA 2, so they did not own the mod, and were unable to ever charge for mod development, and thus after spending 2 years or so working on it, just decided to shut down. Now theoretically I suppose anyone can accept "donations" to a certain degree, but as a business model they were doomed.
I didn't get with the the team that did Dayz, but I am sure the original guys didn't see a penny of the money. Not to mention I have a theory they didn't even make WarZ or have a hand in making it. So in the end, they made a great idea that someone else used to make a ton of money. Granted the spin off was buggy and flawed, which gave more pull to the original mod which is great and all, but in the end it is ARMA 2 that profits....
CLIFF NOTES - If you don't write the software you don't own the mod. You can claim ownership in a title credit but you do not actually own the mod.
We mainly play electronica, see my post above 
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