But this is why the modding community has the problem with permawalls. People get too entitled and greedy. They think they deserve to be paid for a hobby that doesn't even involve tangible things. And the mods and custom content are usually modifications of the game, so basically they aren't "creating" something from scratch.
Paywalls should have been banned and frowned upon from the beginning.
I think the issue is that it’s a grey scale- there are some very magnificent mods and custom content out there that would have taken hundreds of hours to make, of which some are literally cornerstones of the game.
Do those people warrant some form of compensation for their work, and to incentivize them to make more mods? Sure, and one could say that people usually err away from donations.
But is it a necessity in the modding community? I’m not so sure, and the previous games in the franchise got along just as well without widespread use of paywalls (I.e. NRAAS in TS3). One could in-fact argue that paywalls ruin the spirit of modding, and turn it into a business perched at the tippy top of Maslow’s Pyramid. Likewise, there are also tons of Sims 4 modders who do this stuff for free, proving that paid modding is not a necessity.
And are there are lots of unscrupulous modders who steal models and textures from other games like Genshin or Second Life (basically stealing from other creators in this case), sloppily convert them to the Sims 4, and who then lock them behind paywalls- more than you can count.
Ultimately, I think that early access was a good middle ground, but there are simply too many modders who have ruined that goodwill by permanently locking their content behind paywalls.
That being said, EA has made its decision, now let’s see if they’ll enforce it.
