#paywall

Speaking about the eternal topic of paid access, I’d like to share my opinion (even though no one asked for it).

I want to note right away that I’m talking about permanently paid content — I have no complaints about early access.

I saw that a certain person wrote that hoping to get custom content from certain paid authors for free is impudence, because they put a lot of effort and time into creating it.

That sounds fair, but do free creators put in less effort? Let’s say this is a debatable issue. There can also be long discussions about what counts as high-quality content.

But I want to draw attention to something else: these creators do not exist in a vacuum. They didn’t gain their knowledge on their own. Everything we and they know about modding in The Sims 2 is the result of intellectual — and not only intellectual — work done by many people.

I also see that paid creators tend to form closed, elitist groups and do not share their experience with the rest of the community, even though they benefit from its collective knowledge.

For example, would these paid creators be able to make their content without SimPE? This software is distributed for free. Or didn’t they learn from tons of tutorials published absolutely for free?

Programs, plugins, resources — all of this helps our community thrive around an old game abandoned by its developers (don’t tell me about Legacy).

It’s the players who openly share knowledge about their favorite game who prevent it from being forgotten and keep reviving interest in it again and again.

Let’s imagine all custom content for The Sims 2 were distributed for a fee. This would cool interest in the game — not only because obviously not every player could afford to buy everything. It would also make content creation less sustainable: access to resources would be more difficult, and competition in the creator market would split the income so much that it would become negligible.

Black screen popped up asking for payment and then I woke up.

Just a few years ago, most paywalled newspapers let you read a certain number of articles for free every month. So like, you would be granted 5 free articles every month and once you ran out then you’d be paywalled. Nowadays I can’t click on a New York Times or Forbes or Washington Post article without IMMEDIATELY being told I need to pay for a subscription.

I knew it’s been bad for a while but I was so angry the other day because I was trying to give a conservative family member links to reputable articles about how many Americans needlessly suffer and die due to the US healthcare insurance system. And I had to keep digging because SO MANY ARTICLES were paywalled right off the bat.