Nothing new there, devs have been either outright copying or duplicating mod content for years/decades now after the mod feature became popular enough.
Easiest way to spot this? Compared actual Vanilla WoW to both current WoW and "Classic" versions and see what added features there are. Then go through the mod history of the game and find almost all the newer quality of life features at some point existing as a standalone, fan created mod.
Bethesda have been caught stealing mod content before too, Nintendo 'fixed' their classic games with pirated cracks and I believe Ubisoft have done that in the past, they're all cunts. Not because they used these methods but because they never gave any credit and tried to lie. A guy who managed to reverse engineer and fix the GTA source code and the infamous infinite loading bug only got paid $10,000 for it which might seem like a lot but rockstar are a billion dollar company.
Maybe for a small company or something sure, but this is Rockstar we're talking about, that's peanuts for them especially given he inevitably helped fixed issues with GTA Online too as a result of that and they may as well have a money printer with that business model.
Honestly, if Blizzard hadn't started to incorporate mods into the default game they would have eventually caught themselves in a pickle. Because they spent a lot of time designing the game around the assumption you'd have a bunch of them, to the point where the game was impossible without.
Like, good luck doing most raids without some DBM knockoff (eventually most bosses gained an energy bar and buffs to denote a lot of that) and outside communication (they had a whole patch for an ingame voice chat that never got used). Or even leveling without ol' Carbonite or the other (all quests now show where everything you need is).
So its less QoL they are taking credit for, and more being so fucking lazy for so long that they built a game that required some external programs to be playable and then realized that had a lot of potential to bite them in the ass.
Nothing new there, devs have been either outright copying or duplicating mod content for years/decades now after the mod feature became popular enough.
Easiest way to spot this? Compared actual Vanilla WoW to both current WoW and "Classic" versions and see what added features there are. Then go through the mod history of the game and find almost all the newer quality of life features at some point existing as a standalone, fan created mod.
Bethesda have been caught stealing mod content before too, Nintendo 'fixed' their classic games with pirated cracks and I believe Ubisoft have done that in the past, they're all cunts. Not because they used these methods but because they never gave any credit and tried to lie. A guy who managed to reverse engineer and fix the GTA source code and the infamous infinite loading bug only got paid $10,000 for it which might seem like a lot but rockstar are a billion dollar company.
Actually a good bounty for a bug fix. Somewhere in the ballpark of 1-2 months salary for a full timer.
Maybe for a small company or something sure, but this is Rockstar we're talking about, that's peanuts for them especially given he inevitably helped fixed issues with GTA Online too as a result of that and they may as well have a money printer with that business model.
So you should pay in proportion to your means? As mentioned above that is quite a good price for a bug-fix.
And how would you measure the exact revenue created? I don't know the details on this story but was the dev required to hand over the fix?
Take-Two's return on equity over the last ten years is barely above the average of the whole market.
And their 2023 numbers were shit terrible, lost a billion dollars.
Honestly, if Blizzard hadn't started to incorporate mods into the default game they would have eventually caught themselves in a pickle. Because they spent a lot of time designing the game around the assumption you'd have a bunch of them, to the point where the game was impossible without.
Like, good luck doing most raids without some DBM knockoff (eventually most bosses gained an energy bar and buffs to denote a lot of that) and outside communication (they had a whole patch for an ingame voice chat that never got used). Or even leveling without ol' Carbonite or the other (all quests now show where everything you need is).
So its less QoL they are taking credit for, and more being so fucking lazy for so long that they built a game that required some external programs to be playable and then realized that had a lot of potential to bite them in the ass.