#redream

Note: it was pay-walled for $10, and supposedly will be released for free whenever it is "done".

I mean, I dunno. I’m definitely of two minds.

Mod creators have existed since the beginning of time and they’ve always worked for free. Which is cool! These people are doing things just because they want to do them. It’s a good way to build applicable skills for game development and there’s always been this kind of graduation process where you go from being a modder to a real-actual game developer. Because being a game developer pays money.

And that system is great. It was a sign of the true mega-fans. People who were so dedicated they took matters in to their own hands and did it themselves just for the love of the game and the love of the community around it.

But the internet and the gig economy is changing everything. People are learning they don’t have to “graduate” to an actual game developer if they don’t want to.

And that can lead to bigger, more robust mods, sure. The line between “modder” and “professional” can be blurred in some really interesting ways. Like, for example, take Cemu, right. The Wii U emulator. That’s an incredible emulator and it runs games very well! Arguably a lot of that is because they make $3000 a month on Patreon. It’s easier to justify working on the emulator because it’s bringing in money, and that attracts other talent looking to make money as well. And it leads to a very high quality emulator. I can often emulate Wii U games better than I can PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube stuff. Sonic Colors at 60fps in Dolphin is a struggle on my system, but 60fps in Breath of the Wild using Cemu is almost flawless. Cemu is magic, and it’s undoubtedly thanks to their Patreon. Horizons have been expanded.

But then you get what happened when Bethesda opened the real-money mod shop in Skyrim, where a lot of mod authors that were doing it for the good of the community flipped over and started charging for their mods. Where they’d have version 1.7 be free, but they’d release version 1.8 and you had to buy it. That kind of thing.

That really wounded the mod community and set a nasty precedent for what could be possible. It introduced a new side to people who would rather make a fast buck. It’s corporatizing something that was normally done for the intrinsic benefit of “because I want to see it” instead of “because I think I can make a lot of money from it.”That shifting of the moral goal posts can lead to uncomfortable directions.

(Understandably, the modding community reacted very negatively to that, and Bethesda turned paid mods off.)

It also calls in to question what games themselves are even charging for, developmentally-speaking? Is $10 for a shader pack really worth it when you could buy a whole entire complete game for that price? Depending on when and where you bought it, you could be spending $10 on the game itself and $10 on the shader mod for that game. That value feels a little out of whack, doesn’t it?

I don’t know how all of this shakes out. I suppose it all depends contextually on whether or not you feel its worth it. I personally wouldn’t spend $10 on a shader pack, but I did buy PPSSPP Gold back in the day because it was $8. I’ve come close to buying Redream.

But those are also emulators. There are a bunch of games across multiple genres I could use them with. They are a platform.

I’m sure a lot of work went in to the RTX Shader pack but also it’s just a shader pack and $10 for that feels a little steep. Going back to worth, PPSSPP Gold cost me $8 and Redream Premium is $5. Both of those cost less than that shader pack and offer more utility.

this is the logo of the latest of community developed dreamcast emulators, replacing the likes of chankast and nullDC. it’s called redream and the software itself is free to download and play but for a modest 8 quid, as they say across the pond, they provide you with a digital key that, when placed in the redream root folder, allows you to play most of the dreamcast library in internal…

I met so many nice ppl that loved mw

But

These ppl arent that bad either