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The recent launch of Starfield has been followed by a recurring discourse on the state of modder’s earnings. Recently, a mod was released for the game patching in DLSS 3. Naturally, there was a split in the community following this, though how does the fact that the original creator is allegedly earning over $40K a month change things?
Nvidia’s DLSS is notably absent from Starfield. While the game was advertised with a partnership to Nvidia’s main graphics card rival AMD – it has since been cleared up that there’s nothing stopping Bethesda from adding DLSS to the game eventually.
Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, is a process that artificially upscales resolution without hammering the frame rate. It’s one of the main selling features of recent Nvidia graphics cards, and there’s an ongoing debate between FSR 2 and DLSS 3. While Starfield natively supports the former, the latter has been added in by modder PureDark, with DLSS 2 available for free and DLSS 3 locked behind a Patreon paywall.
The DLSS 3 mod had a form of DRM, which the Starfield community didn’t take well to. A crack was released for the mod, and this elicited a pretty mixed response from those within online PC gaming communities.
“Patreon locked mods are a cancer in the gaming community. Adding DRM is a whole other level of s***,” writes one Redditor. However, not long before the launch of Starfield, the game’s director Todd Howard said that he wanted to “enable” the creation of mods and make it “not just a hobby, but a career” for modders.
From the looks of things – modding is much more than just a career for PureDark, who seems to be earning over $40K per month through their Patreon. This was first spotted on a Reddit thread, when it was calculated that the PureDark’s 8,500 subscribers are at least paying a collective $40,000 per month. That’s if they’re choosing to pay the minimum tier support package. There’s another package available for $10 per month instead. This means that PureDark could be earning anywhere between $40-80K per month, before taxes and the likes.
Since this was first spotted on Reddit circa 20 hours ago, PureDark has gained over 500 new subscribers equating to at least a minimum $2,500 increase to monthly earnings.
There’s now an ongoing discourse within gaming communities on whether or not modders should be earning this much for their work. What do you think? At the very least, Nvidia are probably kicking themselves for missing out on a slice of the pie.
